Mothers took their mothering so seriously now. Their frantic little faces...Ponytails swinging. Eyes fixed on the mobile phones held in the palms of their hands like compasses.

It's because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a woman can do is make herself attractive to men.

She felt hot liquid anger suddenly cool and harden into something powerful and immovable.

When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy.

When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family, Madeline had told her once.

All conflict can be traced back to someone’s feelings getting hurt, don’t you think?

Nice dress. Take it off.

God is a book I can no longer read.

That’s the problem with following all the rules—somebody else is eventually going to get ahead by breaking them, and then where will you be?

Christianity not only saves you from sin, but from cynicism.

It is by avoiding future sin that we retain a remission of the sins of the past.

Learning how to fly, for me, was so euphoric.

Singing beautiful melodies is one thing, but to deliver the text so that the people understand it, even in a foreign language, has to be worked at very hard.

I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.

Good fighting with you, Seaweed Brain." Ditto.

It would drive the photographers crazy because I would giggle and tell jokes. I was gregarious, and looking back, I realize I had a captive audience.