The new crowd of young women know the world that claims to love them so much actually wants nothing more than to bloodlet them slowly over time.

This was the moment I realized my husband was an actual, honest-to-God idiot: when he suggested with all the sincerity in the world that I might like to bring our two-week-old newborn with me on a jog.

I rarely paid attention to the differences in the children.

“You’ve been wanting to make a comeback all these years, but you haven’t because…because…” I hated having to think this, much less say it. “Because of me?”

I stayed mostly quiet while the rest of the room went through the frankly bewildering business of trying to set SMART targets for a child’s happiness. Having done a lot of this kind of stuff in Barbara Clench’s mandatory team-building meetings, it felt wrong to me to see it applied to something that mattered, rather than to the number of staples we were using. But I also kind of couldn’t look away. It was like a car crash, except a bunch of experts kept explaining very sincerely that if the crash went on long enough, the cars would actually come out of it better off.

For Beatrice-

I bet Prince Charles never let Camilla Parker Bowles’s calls go to voicemail, although he probably should have, at least in the eighties.

I’d reached the stage of my life where people who were younger than me were worrying that they were getting too old for stuff.

"But Uncle Monty-" Klaus said.

"It is your wishes, and only your wishes, that hold sway here. Tell me you feel nothing for me, and I will honor it without question. But I will not yield to less."

“You really do own your illiteracy, don’t you?” “Yeah, I’m thinking about moving to America and running for public office.”

He was unstoppable. He was fully alive. He was a king among men. He was being lifted out of a tangle of bodies by two large, familiar hands, and that was the very best part.