Parents and children were put on earth to give each other grief. You were my punishment for how I behaved to my own father. And I'll have my revenge when you have children of your own.

What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.

Once you can fake sincerity, you can fake anything.

Europeans condemned Chinese foot binding, but any society that had invented the corset had a lot to answer for.

Life is a good deal more comfortable if one doesn't expect it to be fair.

we all grow up thinking our parents found us under cabbage leaves and that sex didn't exist before our personal coming-of-age.

But why, she thought wryly, did a man seem more attractive as he became less available? How humbling to think one had so much in common with a cow stretching its neck through a gate for better grass.