Talia

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman.”
― Sofia Tolstoy, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy: A Chronicle of Marriage to Leo Tolstoy and Turbulent Turn-of-the-Century Russia

“But over the years, of pain and distaste for what her mother had once called 'the horrible side of married life', of lonely days filled with aimless pursuits or downright boredom, of pregnancies, nurses, servants and the ordering of endless meals, it had come to seem as though she had given up of everything for not very much. She had journeyed towards this conclusion by stages hardly perceptible to herself, disguising discontent with some new activity which, as she was a perfectionist, would quickly absorb her. But when she had mastered the art, or the craft, or the technique involved in whatever it was, she realised that her boredom was intact and was simply waiting for her to stop playing with a loom, a musical instrument, a philosophy, a language, a charity or a sport and return to recognising the essential futility of her life. Then, bereft of distracton, she would relapse into a kind of despair as each pursuit betrayed her, failing to provide the raison d'être that had been her reason for taking it up in the first place.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard

“One wanted children; had them, and brought them up: and then, in spite of all the calculations of time and care, they defeated one by producing a result which seemed, to say the least, almost mathematically incorrect.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View

“She felt she was a bottomless pit of memories, and she was only fifteen. What on earth must it be like when you reached the Duchy’s age? You’d hardly be able to think at all for them; it would be like having so much furniture in a room that there was nowhere left to move.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, Marking Time