So, what do they pay you for...exactly?Slapped around. Tied up. Beaten. Given orders, made to do things.What kind of things?You know.No, I can't even begin to imagine.Lick my boots, crawl on floor, ea...
Slattern! What a wonderful new word. 'Slattern,' I murmur appreciatively to Patricia.'Yes, slattern,' Bunty says firmly. 'That's what she is.''Not a slut like you then?' Patricia says very quietly. Lo...
She was flawed, no longer intact. On the other hand, she felt as if she had been scourged clean. The past no longer weighed so heavily on the present.
She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.
She didn’t feel she had the fortitude for all those Tudors, they were so relentlessly busy – all that bedding and beheading.
She could have started up a branch library (or a spectacular house fire)
Popular versus literary—a false divide?
Olivia was her only beautiful child. Julia, with her dark curls and snub nose, was pretty but her character wasn't, Sylvia --- poor Sylvia, what could you say? And Amelia was somehow ...bland, but Oli...
No point in thinking, she said briskly, you just have to get on with life. (She really was turning into Miss Woolf.) We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it righ...
Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. Gone, she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.
Maths was the one true thing, according to Nancy.
Love. Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.
Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
Juliet sighed and wondered if one day she would think herself to death. Was that possible? And would it be painful?
It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it.
It had been a while since Juliet had shared her bed with anyone. There had been a few, but she thought of them as mistakes rather than lovers,
In the prosperous household of Sylvie's childhood, Cook was called 'Cook' but Mrs Glover preferred 'Mrs Glover'. It made her irreplaceable. Sylvie still stubbornly referred to her as Cook.
In the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there. It seemed to Ursula that you got there was the whole point.
If Richard had lived, perhaps... but one cannot look backwards, only forwards. What has passed has passed for ever. What is it Heraclitus says? One Cannot step in the same river twice?' ... 'More or l...
I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather’s nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is...