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Zoe looked back upon the ruins of the old life with astonishment at her innocence then; that she had really believed you could exempt yourself so easily from the grown-up burdens, as if you were children playing house.

Now that she had Pearl, this order of life - in which the material arrangements floated lightly on the periphery and knowledge and books and music were the real dense substance at the centre - was completely over-turned.

He made no separation between his life and his work. He reacted to books with a fierce partisanship as if writing was a matter as serious as life and death.

Fiona hadn't even been willing to exchange a few words with her; as though she suspected that Zoe's very desire for her friendship was something fake, something to show off, some deal Zoe was trying to make to get absolution for her own privilege, for university, for 'Cambridge', for arty parents and a big house.

Fiona hadn't even been willing to exchange a few words with her; as though she suspected that Zoe's very desire for her friendship was something fake, something to show off, some deal Zoe was trying to make to get absolution for her own privilege, for university, for 'Cambridge', for arty parents and a big house.

Fiona was very willing to be Zoe's friend; the only difficulty was that she was willing to be everybody's. Zoe was jealous, and persistent; she grabbed Fiona by the arm in a quick settling gesture of claim and possession…

If you touched them yourself, possessed them, put them on, might you not take on something of the superior substance and depth that the past had, in contrast to the shallow present? This active nostalgia, and an elegiac sense that the best things were gone, were Zoe's first strong abstract emotions.

Once she had come, through books mostly, to believe that there had really been other times in the past when things were done differently, she felt sure that the past must have been a better place. This was first and foremost an aesthetic judgement.

Once she had come, through books mostly, to believe that there had really been other times in the past when things were done differently, she felt sure that the past must have been a better place. This was first and foremost an aesthetic judgement.

It seems to me that writing is an extension of reading step that not every obsessive reader is impelled to take, but, for those who do so, one that springs from serendipitous reading. Books beget books.

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others.

She had wondered about having a child, and believed that he did the same, though nothing was said. And then something happened: feeling had withered, she no longer smiled at the sound of his key in the lock, she found herself treasuring time to herself. And she saw that this was so for him too. They became like courteous strangers, skirting any serious engagement. And, eventually, fell apart.

She was alone, but not lonely. Once, she had lived with a man.
She knew all about being half of a couple-about living with someone else's views, foibles, habits, their way of folding a news-paper, washing a plate. She knew that curious fusion of companionship and private distance; she knew about good sex and bad sex and sudden quarrels and the warm glow of reconciliation.

And then, once in a while, she would wake in the night, often after some dream in which she had been a child again, or some younger self, and would lie there thinking: I am forty-seven, for heaven's sake, and I don't know how this has come about. It was as though there were some baleful presence along. side, forcing her to stare at this unrelenting fact: look, look hard, and don't you forget it.

At forty-seven, Sarah occasionally felt that life had her by the scruff of the neck. Mostly, you could ignore the passage of time; that is to say, you tamed it, you reduced it to diary pages, to dates and days of the week, to the setting on the alarm clock or the start of a television program. You ignored the darker implications, the stalking footsteps.

It was because that is what history does to people. It picks them up by the scruff of the neck and puts them where they do not want to be. It scuppers them; it condemns them to national service and then throws them this, as an extra treat.

"I mean, in a sense I should actually be grateful to her. If she hadn't been the way she was, would I be who I am?
Look at it this way—maybe I needed that sort of kick-start. It's an old story, isn't it? Making good. I didn't exactly claw my way out of the gutter, but there's an analogy, don't you think?

By now, Chloe regarded her mother as simply a part of life's complexity. She could still be mildly irritated by Miranda but saw her as, essentially, the crucial directive element in her own struggle for fulfillment.

Chloe saw that a successful parent required the skills of an industrial arbitrator—the patience, the craft, the ability to identify and push forward a cohesive argument. Along with qualities of leadership and a taste for coercion. Well, she could supply all of that, given time and practice.

Beyond the intransigence of infants there lies the guile of childhood-the awesome powers of manipulation, the tenacity, the volatility, the flight from anything approaching consistency or rationality.

Second time round, Chloe was grimly prepared. She knew the battle lines, she knew the limits of her endurance, she knew that even in this ultimate test of the human spirit there is a little room for maneuver, even for some travesty of negotiation. When the third baby arrived, Chloe was ready and waiting-trained, hard-ened, a combat veteran. She knew how to do babies, insofar as that is possible.

Confronted with her first baby, Chloe was stopped in her tracks-scuppered, floored. This was the most intransigent being she had encountered, bar none. She faced anarchy, on a daily basis.
Nothing she had learned or experienced had prepared her for this- this collapse of all expectations of order. Sophie performed as babies do, and had her mother on the ropes, glassy-eyed.

Her father never mentioned her (and never said, "You are what I traded your mother for, and it was a bad bargain at that," which was what Evie continually expected to hear). But the bedjacket, with its satin buttons, seemed to be giving him away without his realizing it, speaking up out of all those years of silence.

The pain feels like a hole swallowing her up, a source of intense fear and yet, at the same time, a strange, quiet peace.

Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.