Status Updates From Wicked Women

What you always forget is that just because you're connected, the object of your love is not necessarily, let alone permanently, so. As if you'd made a telephone call and the other person has spoken for a little and then wandered off, and not hung up, so that not only can't you speak to them, but you can’t use the telephone either, for anyone else—

Since there was no justice in death, you’d better find it in life, however disagreeable it made you in the eyes of others, in your own eyes too.

Too late now. For who ever lived totally as they wanted to: who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.

Why hasn’t Paula sealed the hole in the bedroom floor? Paula needs to know what's going on. Paula suspects that her husband Dcakey sometimes has it off in the room below with Audrey, the woman next door. Audrey is married to an adulterous husband. For all anyone knows, the condition is catching. Who is to say what goes on when our eyes are closed and we sleep (…)

It is strange enough for a woman to give birth to a man; how can the female produce the male? It seems to go against both reason and nature, but a woman learns to get used to the notion. A man has never even had this simple lesson in accepting the unlikely. He has to start from scratch, dealing with not quite the unthinkable, but the so far unthought.

Disgraceful people often develop very rare and precise skills, so that others will be obliged to put up with them.

Children are no different from adults, other than in scale and lack of experience; their clamour, their tugging at the conscience and coatstrings of those they see as powerful, render dazed, punch drunk and rude those who are paid to suffer it.

The boy would not be seen in public, even on the steps of a disgraced and shuttered house, with a black plastic sack. He would rather die than lose his dignity. This is what private education does to a lad.

Leda cried. Naiad, child of tears, creature of mythology. If you wandered round Mount Olympus, you could always find a Naiad weeping in the corner of some pool; half-tree, half-water, all female; creating the tears that filled the pool, that gave you enough to swim in.

When Leda came home from the swimming pool her eyes would be pink and swollen. When Gosling admired other women - not unkindly or over-frequently - he would always refer to their bright, wide, young eyes.

Sometimes Leda's heart ached so much she thought she was having some kind of seizure. She could not distinguish physical from mental pain. Still she swam.

Bessic was twelve and Bertie was ten. They would wake this Christmas morning to a house which lacked a mother. Lucy put that image from her too. Bessie had Edwin's beetling brows; Bertie aped Edwin's clipped, dry manner of speech. They were Edwin's children more than Lucy's. Pierre saw it. Edwin claimed it. The law acknowledged it: let the law have its way.

To do good to one is to do bad to another. But you don't need to hear my excuses. They are the same that everyone makes to themselves when faced with the misery of others, and though they would like to do the right thing, simply fail to do so, but look after themselves instead.

I am generally accepted as a pleasant and kindly enough person. My family loves me, even my wife Joanna, though she and I live apart and are no longer sexually connected. She doesn't have to love me.

He could see Milly was good, but what a man wanted was something more than honest worth.

She double-took the world, experiencing it in its shifting experience of her: this was not a gift a woman should have.

Anything happening is better than nothing happening. Who wants the last days of peace, when they could have the first days of war? Most things are good at the beginning.