Your beauty only lasts an instant; in fact, it can only exist in the first flush of youth.

A woman of the poor cannot be beautiful unless she gets out of her class.

Daily labour makes her lose all her freshness and strength, and maternity in the midst of poverty absorbs even the marrow in her bones.

When her daily work is ended and she returns home, she has to sweep and wash, and shrivel herself to a mummy before the smoky kitchen stove.

I loved Lucy for that reason, because she was consumed and drained by sweating, because she was the girl worker in all her melancholy decadence, born beautiful and made hideous by social injustice." He recalled the unbending and deadly hatred with which that little woman spoke so quietly of the supreme vengeance of the fallen, of the revenge for long years of oppression.