Maura Heaphy Dutton

“The town itself was an island between sea and river, muttering and drawing into itself as soon as it felt the cold. Every fifty years or so it had lost, as though careless or indifferent to such things,anther means of communication.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

“Family wasn't like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a "nuclear family": it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relatives-by-marriage and otherwise -- it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you wherever you go.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“... and believe me, Mrs. Green, she'll be pegging out her own washing until the day she dies.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

“Why was it, he wondered, that all these stories envisaged technological marvels by the bushel, but seemed to assume that social structure and culture wouldn't change in over four centuries? (Chad Oliver, "The Ant and the Eye")”
― William Sloane, Stories For Tomorrow, stories by Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and others