“It is laughable how often good manners interfere with my survival.”

“What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes and games and pleasure included; what's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy.”

“I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.”

“It's my red hair that interferes with my good sense. All that color so close to my brain, it plum disorients me most days.”

“it does not often happen that the interference of friends will persuade a young man of independent fortune to think no more of a girl.”

“Anna is part of a generation that often seems frozen in place by their unreleting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still.”