All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it.

How has anyone ever understood anyone, except through love, which is wordless?

Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

one tends to suspect others of what one is guilty of oneself. The unfaithful wife is quick to suspect the husband of infidelity.