…People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyo… - Kathleen Winter

It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.

When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tears and anger: 'Why do you want to go out in minus-fifteen-degree temperatures in that T-shirt when you could wear the wool I've warmed for you over the woodstove? It's so cosy.' Or they can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants Safety is not what it wants.

Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it.

Everyone was trying to define everything so carefully, Jacinta felt; they wanted to annihilate all questions.