“There is a moment in every relationship when one of the parties senses its imminent demise. There's a moment of incredible clarity when your stomach drops with a heavy sense of dread, and you feel like control is slipping through your fingertips even as you try to hold on. ”

“There's no time to hold grudges when you've seen how fragile things can really be.”

“That's the thing," Jo says. "You think you know what you're in for. I mean, you tell yourself that, of course, it's not going to be wine and roses and all of that bullshit for the rest of your life, but then, one day, you wake up, and your fucking husband has morphed into someone whom you barely recognize. And you sit there and you stare at him while he scratches his balls through his underwear at the kitchen table, and you think, 'This is totally not what I signed up for. I mean, who knows if I even love this ball-scratching, foul-breathed man?' And then you wonder if you love him more out of habit than out of anything else." She chews the inside of her lip and considers. "And I guess from there, all bets are off.”

“What was the one moment we lost our way? Or was it a series of moments that snowballed into something larger, something intangible, something careeining forward with too much acceleration for us to stop it now?”

“...I realize that lessons are meant to be learned, honored even, or else you can spend your life running so far from them that you erect a false existence around the very thing you should be embracing.”

“You have to know... What you have to know in all of this, through all of this, is that no matter how lost you are in this maze of hell and confusion, that in the end, I promise you, you will be found.”

“I'd recognized it only recently. I wasn't sure if it was because she had changed or I had, but it didn't really matter. I recognized it just the same... If you just noticed the shiny veneer on the outside, they'd always look perfect. So you had to peer closer, watch them when they didn't think they were being watched. Eventually, you'd notice the dings.”