“The only type of men Julia's mother had warned her about were wealthy industrialist who polluted the environment and took advantage of third-world countries. And Republilicans.”

“A miracle is a single mom who works two jobs to care for her kids and still helps them with their homework at night. A miracle is a child donating all the money in their piggy bank to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. That's where you'll find the hand and face of God.”

“No sense in being pessimistic. It wouldn't work anyway.”

“When I can't sleep I count the buckles on my straightjacket.”

“being in love can be frightening,and sometimes its easier to fight it than it is to face it.”

“She had stood there with the phone pressed to her ear as though it were a huge plastic seashell, all the unhappy years of her marriage echoing again in her eardrums, washing up in the coils of her memory.”

“He had lived as a handful of taffy between his mother and his father all his life, had been pulled in so many directions, stretched here and there, that all he could do was plaster a mighty smile on his face.”