J. Courtney Sullivan

“Ruby shook her head, but she smiled, a look that said she loved this man, loved the life they had made together. They seemed utterly comfortable with one another, like they knew each other all the way through.”

“...life was messy, conflict inevitable. It didn't mean you had to fall apart.”

“Maggie wondered if in some ways all the complaining only made matters worse.”

“You all seem to think you should marry someone when you feel this intense emotion, which you call love. And then you expect the love will fade over time, as life gets harder. When what you should do is find yourself a nice enough fellow and let real love develop over years and births and deaths and so on.”

“All of it remained, a constant reminder: He existed, then he didn't. The world spins on, indifferent to the mess.”

“But then you were alone, your body trying to heal itself while your mind went numb. There was a mix of joy and the purest love, couples with real boredom and occasional rage. It got easier as the kids got older, but it never got easy.”

“even if there was no God there was always the ocean- before you and after you, breathing in and out for all eternity.”

“Some women were created to make other women feel like shit about themselves.”

“She didn't have a single friend on earth to see her off. She had outlived them all.”

“How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?”

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.”

“Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.”

“She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.”

“These fucking women really piss me off,' April said. 'Because instead of being elated by the thought of making their own happiness and chasing some crazy dream, all they want to do is narrow their options and do something safe.”

“I think we're just different sorts of people, me and you. You're a planner. Everything has to be perfectly aligned before you make a move, or you're afraid the whole damn world will come crashing down. For me, it's more like, "We're having a baby. Now what?”

“If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.”

“Bree knew this habit of hers rankled Lara more than any other--her ability to make a decision and announce that there would be no further discussion was, in Lara's opinion, 'Cruel and selfish behavior, the type usually enacted by men with small penises.”

“The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.”

“There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old.”

“April's just a Dixie cup of crazy. Lydia's more like a twenty-gallon tank”

“With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.”

“She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.”

“Once this kid came into the world, Sally knew, she would live in constant terror of somehow injuring or losing her. Having her tucked deep inside her belly was the safest she would ever feel about the child, and even that was scary.”

“A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.”

“We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.”

“Kids are amazing. The first few months, they're just like these loaves of bread that shit. You're wondering what the hell you got yourself into. But then, they turn into people. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.”

“And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to approve of it.”