She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter

The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him. – Vida Winters Page 268

But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.

As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.