Sula

“Even the foreseen loss of your parents at a normal age brings shocks you have not bargained for. One is that you must finally face the fact that you are grown up. While they are alive, you can be their child, even in middle age. They stand between you and death. With both of them gone, you are next in line.
But that is nothing compared to the unexpected gap, the vast space, not a desert or emptiness, because a desert has substance, and emptiness implies containment. An infinite nothing.”
― Monica Dickens, An Open Book

“Wonderland has no obvious formal structure; its incidents follow each other quite casually, like a dream sequence. Looking-Glass is based on the very tight pattern of a game of chess.”
― John Rowe Townsend, Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children's Literature

“One must know how to destroy so that one may build, to weed so that useful plants may grow.”
― Elizabeth Coatsworth, Here I Stay

“Recent memory replays like a film. For instance, if I think of our Christmas party last year, I see movement and colour and hair as people mill about, hands raised in greeting, a head thrown back in laughter. There are babies and doting women on the kitchen floor, bent backs converging on the bread and cheese like grackles at the bird feeder, the swirl of a skirt as the piano starts and someone dances, the young girls of my family moving through the crowd with their bright beautiful faces among the middle-aged. Far off memory comes more in stills than moving pictures. Of a whole chunk of your life, you may be left with a few stock shots, motion arrested to capture the essence of a span of time.”
― Monica Dickens, An Open Book