“To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.”

“Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable? Sometimes [his] gestures and inflections were so mercilessly familiar that it was as if he were an extension of me, an element of my own personality over which I had little control.”

“I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.”

“What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?”

“I have been granted the terrible privilege of deciding what would have happened with no one left to contradict me. And maybe I am absolutely wrong.”

“Ordinarily, of course, I thought it best to remain inconspicuous, but the gesture had a certain irresistable theatricaility, and an inevitablility. Sometimes you can feel the pull of what other people want from you, and you sacrifice yourself, you risk seeming odd or sunsavory, to keep them entertained.”

“She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.”