It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn't how it was going to be for me.

I say, leave me alone, this is my winter, I will stay here if I choose.

I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time.

You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

Her life began to seem long. Her adrenalin was running out. Soon she would be thirty, and all she could see ahead was more of the same.

there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it.

She says the clogs are comfortable, and that comfort trumps fashion as far as she's concerned. Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã¢â‚¬œ who used to be a passionate Yeats fan Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã¢â‚¬œ is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different, and in actual fact Yeats is dead. Reynolds

The older women, the married ones and the widows, wear black clothes and no makeup, as I used to do. When I was in the later months of pregnancy, they would smile at me, as if I was almost one of them. Now they smile at Sarah first.

Though it's hard to concentrate on the idea of a future. She's too immersed in the present:

I believe in effort, but not in unnecessary effort: Aunt Vidala was most likely negotiating her exit from this world all on her own.