“I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.”

“How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.”

“I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.”

“Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.”

“The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.”

“Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.”

“Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.”