Yazz was the miracle she never thought she wanted, and having a child really did complete her, something she rarely confided because it somehow seemed anti-feminist.

What matters most to me, is that I know how I feel, and the rest of the world might catch up one day, even if it’ll be a quiet revolution over longer than my lifetime, if it happens at all.

Megan should have been grateful and accepted her cute status, what girl doesn’t want to be told how lovely she is, how special? except it felt wrong, even at a young age, something in her realized that her prettiness was supposed to make her compliant, and when she wasn’t, when she rebelled, she was letting down all those invested in her being adorable.

Winsome likes the fact that Rachel is curious enough to know who her grandmother was before she was a mother, when she was a person in her own right, as she described it except she never has been, first she was a daughter, then a wife and mother, and now also a grandmother and great-grandmother.

You lucky I ain’t taking a hammer to you, but you’re not worth a life sentence.

African peoples were referred to as black long after the word made its appearance in the English language, so it makes no sense to retroactively impose racist connotations on to its everyday usage, and if you do, you’re going to drive yourself mad and, I’m sorry to say, everyone else with you.

He’ll be moulded by America, that’s for sure, just by being there. He won’t even be aware it’s happening. He’ll be filled with the American sense of self-belief, and the sense of can-do, and the Harvard sense of entitlement.

Amma experienced commitment to one person as imprisonment, she hadn’t left home for a life of freedom and adventure to end up chained to another person’s desires.

Life is about taking risks, not about burying your head in the sand.

Some folk have to react against something: parents, siblings, government, society. They think they have free will, when all they doing is wilfully opposing.