I mean, if somebody said to me, junior year of college, you can go anywhere, your old man's paying for it, I'd have been gone in a flash. But I had to work. Every summer my mother would say, 'Get that job and hold on to it until August 30.'
My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Sai...
We cannot ensure that women will be free of discrimination in the workplace and everywhere as long as women are not universally defended under our Constitution. As it stands now, the equal rights of women are subject to interpretation of law. That is...
Whatever past you had, when you become a mother, it's a whole different thing. You can't even predict it. I've seen women who were nightmare party girls, who were just crazy, and then they have a baby, and this thing comes over them and changes them.
Because our generation has waited so long to have babies, we feel we've 'discovered' something that women have been doing for thousands of years. I have no illusions that I will be in the same situation as the average working mother. I'm not trying t...
I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' ...
I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there.
Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or ...
It takes will power and nerve to hold the stick that way, to keep his eyes open and watch the rocky face of the cliff, pine-bearded, rush up at them. O'Shaughnessy's mouth flattens, his face goes white. And then in that final fraction of a moment, he...
Cocky little king. You assume you're the only one that gives me satisfaction?" His smile widens as he lifts one of my arms and kisses the sensitive skin of my wrist. "If there is something in this world that can please you more than me," he says, his...
I also believe that man’s continued domestication (if you care to use that silly euphemism) of dogs is motivated by fear: fear that dogs, left to evolve on their own, would, in fact, develop thumbs and smaller tongues, and therefore would be superi...
Benjamin and I sat in the middle of one of the large canoes with our grandmother in the stern, directing us past shoals and through rapids and into magnificent stretches of water. One day the clouds hung low and light rain freckled the slate-grey wat...
She held him at arms’ length, looked at the pipe still gripped inn his hand, then looked at his face and read him like a book. She ran the tip of her red tongue slowly across her full cushiony, sensuous lips, making them wet-red and looked him stra...
I drank from the crisp mountain stream, tasting filtered sky with a mossy undertone. I’ve never understood how being loved fully could change your entire perspective of the world. I only ever understood the wistfulness of it, and the longing and th...
On the edge of a tropical ocean, in a thousand reflections of the silver light of an invisible moon, among undulations of restless waters, ceaselessly changing... Among silent breakers, the tremors of the shining surface, in the swift flux and reflux...
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the...
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones w...
I find no peace, and all my war is done, I fear and hope; I burn and freeze like ice; I fly above the wind yet can I not arise; And naught I have and all the world I seize on. That looseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison, And holdeth me not, yet can...
A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself...
In truth, he had always considered the sight of men eating croissants slightly ridiculous, especially at the beginning, when for the first bite they had to maneuver the point of the crescent into their mouths. No matter what a person did, he ended up...
I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said. But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her. Of course I did, thought Peter; it almos...
