Joan

“This person is now lost to her for ever. She is someone adrift in her life, who doesn’t recognise it. She is unmoored, at a loss. She is someone who weeps if she cannot find a shoe or overboils the soup or trips over a pot. Small things undo her. Nothing is certain any more.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were. She wishes to scratch the ground, perhaps with a hoe, to score the streets beneath her, so that there will forever be a mark, for it always to be known that this way Hamnet came. He was here.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“Without much discussion, we have created a two-tier justice system. If you shoplift at the grocery store, you can be carted off to jail. But if you steal tens of millions of dollars from the tax authorities or fraudulently peddle dangerous drugs from a corporate suite, you’ll be hailed for your business savvy.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope