The Chrysalids

"Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily."

"'Women like to think they're in love when they want to marry; they feel it's a justification which helps their self-respect... No harm in that; most of them are going to need all the illusions they can keep up, anyway. But a woman who IS in love is a different proposition. She lives in a world where all the old perspectives have altered. She is blinkered, single-purposed, undependable in other matters. She will sacrifice anything, including herself, to one loyalty. For her, that is quite logical; for everyone else it looks not quite sane; socially it is dangerous.'"

I learnt to live half a life