There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.