The wife belongs to a book club. All they do is moan about their husbands. They never talk about the bloody books at all.

Look which way the bones lie. The position tells you everything. In Christian burials, bodies are usually buried facing east, supposedly towards heaven. Sometimes priests and religious leaders are buried facing west, so that they can rise facing their people. Facing downwards, you are looking at something else altogether.

His parents, who were Catholic in the stubborn way some old recusant English families are, sticking to their faith all through the Reformation, never expected any of their children to take it this far.

Once you have had a child, can you ever go back to being the person you were?

You can’t convert by words, only by deeds.

Ruth isn’t going to be bossed about by a woman in tight trousers who thinks she’s Helen Mirren playing Jane Tennison. She.

She doesn’t place the rights of animals above those of humans but she does, undoubtedly, prefer her cats to many humans.

Cool. Can I come over? Phil’s got the flu and he’s being such a man about it.

Why is her first reaction to invitations always to think of a way of refusing them?

Ruth doesn’t have children and she has never been pregnant. Now that she is nearly forty and thinking that she might never have a child, it all seems such a waste. All that machinery chugging away inside her, making her bleed each month, making her moody and bloated and desperate for chocolate. All that internal plumbing, all those pipes gurgling away, all for nothing.