One Whole and Perfect Day Quotes

Plenty of kids had single-parent families; [Lily] knew that, just as she knew it wasn't the absence of a father, or even the smallness of their family […] that made them stand out. No, thought Li...

[Clara's] dad had wanted her to study medicine instead of arts. Medicine was what he'd wanted to study when he'd been young, only his elderly parents had forced him to do accounting instead. (4.3)

Lily was the sensible one of the family. She always had been. She could write her name and count to fifty before she started school, and even tie her own shoelaces, something her mum said Lonnie ha...

Lily thought [Pop] was a bit of a racist, too, or at least the sort of reactionary old person who thought a decent Aussie was the best kind of person in the world. (1.16)

Mum was okay, sort of: a pale, slender woman with wispy blonde hair pulled back in an untidy knot. The worst you could say of her was that she worried about Lonnie too much and worked too hard at h...

"I want to study what I like," Clara had insisted, almost adding, "I don't want to end up like you!" (4.4)

For a start, she had no dad; he'd bolted back home to America when Lily had been no larger than a plum pip deep inside her mother. She'd never even seen her father. (1.2)

"Well, old people get abandoned every single day! Left on park benches! In railway stations! Without even a label around their neck to tell people who they are!" (3.45)

"I believe so." It was a vague enough answer, devoid of any hard information, yet when Marigold heard it, her mother's heart had given a small leap of joy—perhaps Lonnie would be all right after...

These days […] Lily found her grandmother's companion unsettling. Could Nan—in the nicest possible way, of course—actually be a bit daffy? (1.16)