“These men were like leeches; they sucked away at the goodness of a woman's heart until it was dry and all her love had been used up. That took a long time, he knew, because women seemed to have vast reservoirs of goodness in them”

“A good woman is a wondrous creature, cleaving to the right and to the good under all change: lovely in youthful comeliness, lovely all her life long in comeliness of heart.”

“Every woman I knew secretly longed to have many lovers but she stopped herself for so many reasons. I had the capacity to love many at a time and for this had been called shallow and wayward and a good-time girl…”

“I used to suck [Smarties] until they were all white, let them dry, and then put them back in the packet and show my mum the Smarties with no colour on them.”

“In her businesslike way she thought that her life had begun when she was a very young woman and she really did look lovely: you knew it wouldn't last and you packed all you could into it — but men were different. A man like B — like Alfie, too — never got beyond the time when they were boys and, damn them, it kept them young.”

“It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.”

“Her mother had once told her that there were men who kept secrets bottled up inside and that it spelled trouble for the women who loved them.”

“We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.”

“Betsy, like all good women, had a temper of her own.”

“In a way, looking back, it seemed a long, long time since she had been eighteen, but in another way her memories were so clear and vivid that it seemed like yesterday.”