Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

As for my father, few souls are less troubled. He can be simply pleased with us, pleased that we exist, and, from the vantage point of his wondrously serene old age, he contemplates our lives almost as if they were books he can dip into whenever he wants. His back pages, perhaps.

They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

She said to the Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: 'I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy!' She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.