Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer .I would put my sisters.

Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words - "spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers" - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.

He was born a politician. No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.

My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.

I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.