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1 " She wished Martin hadn't taken his Encyclopaedia Britannica with him when they split up. She missed that more than she missed him. "
― , The Vanishing Princess
2 " I'd better explain something about myself. Just as I wasn''t your archetypal beauty of a miller's daughter, I also did not have the same hankerings after pretty golden princes as my peers were universally supposed to have. Don't ask me why. A matter of personal taste. The King, as handsome as a former fairytale prince must be once he's stopped being a frog, left me cold. I had always been attracted to—how can I put it?—the unusual. The shepherd boy was no one's idea of an Adonis; he suffered badly from the after-effects of chickenpox, and had a body which at best could be called weedy. But once he did the things he did, I came to love each and every pock mark on his pallid cheeks, and lay in my bed at night entertaining myself with visions of his skinny thighs and thin, unmanly, rounded shoulders. It's fascinating how human desire can find all manner of things exciting once it's been given a push in the right direction. "
3 " ...he was an ass. Her husband and Thomas' father was an ass: a fool who thought iut funny to frighten a small child, who could not resist the small, mean act of betrayal that proved him more powerful than his four-year-old son. "
4 " ...as a child, she had believed in God because it was so clear, so obvious, that he existed. She couldn't imagine how anyone could think differently. And then, ten years on, the same absolute conviction that there was no deity, no otherness, only the material world that could be seen, heard and felt. How could anyone possibly believe in God? It wasn't until a further ten years on that she had come to the possibility of agnosticism, and the ability to live with an uncertainty. Even then, she had trouble understanding how anyone could believe firmly one way or the other. "
