When I read, I'm purely a reader

There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.

Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.

I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.

(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.

Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away