“He also thinks there’s something in the Carpathian woman’s chemistry that makes it impossible for the female chromosome to beat out the male.”“Wouldn’t you know he’d think it was the woman,” Shea sniffed contemptuously.”

“It was like trying to think about what he’d be thinking if he never existed. He wouldn’t be thinking about what he was thinking. He just wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t hurt.”

“There’s something about seeing an adult you knew in childhood that makes them marginally vulnerable to you, and vice versa. There’s also something comforting in thinking that if they made it this far, relatively unscathed, then maybe you didn’t turn out half bad either.”

“Not only is there no way to make everyone happy, it’s nearly impossible to make anyone happy. And anyway, most people only think they want to be happy. Including me. There’s something wildly freeing about knowing that.”

“Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.”

“In the long history of male and female relations all the way back to the Garden, I can't think of one in which a woman's anger ever won over a man.”