“This desperate aversion to seeming like you wanted anything, or worse, to going after it, stayed with me for years after I left Ault.”

“And as for Martha-I never understood when I was at Ault why she liked me as much as I liked her. Even now, I'm still not sure. I couldn't give back half of what she gave me, and that fact should have knocked off the balance between us, but it didn't, and I don't know why not....But she had liked me before I became likable; that was the confusing part....Martha was the closest friend I'd ever had; I was, as always, preoccupied by the present moment; and I was too young then to understand how simple facts of geography and time can separate people.”

“And now I knew myself to be generous with encouragement only when I either did not want the thing the other person sought or did not believe the person would really get it. It was the opposite of what I aspired to - in the moment of truth, I wanted to be loyal and forthright, reliable, humble, trustworthy. Instead, I was greedy and envious.”

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

“I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.”

“See, I always forget this about you," he says, and even now, long after we first lost our privacy, I can't help wondering who's overhearing him. "Every decade, you like to pin me to the ground, pull open my mouth, and take a sh** right into it.”

“But maybe this is what Hannah has always wanted: a man who will deny her. A man of her own who isn't hers. Isn't it the real reason she broke up with Mike--not because he moved to North Carolina for law school (he wanted her to go with him, and she said no) but because he adored her? If she asked him to get out of bed and bring her a glass of water, he did. If she was in a bad mood, he tried to soothe her. It didn't bother him if she cried, or if she didn't wash her hair or shave her legs or have anything interesting to say. He forgave it all, he always thought she was beautiful, he always wanted to be around her. It became so boring! She'd been raised, after all, not to be accommodated but to accommodate, and if she was his world, then his world was small, he was easily satisfied. After a while, when he parted her lips with his tongue, she'd think, Thrash, thrash, here we go. She wanted to feel like she was striving cleanly forward, walking into a bracing wind and learning from her mistakes, and she felt instead like she was sitting in a deep, squishy sofa, eating Cheetos, in an overheated room. With Oliver, there is always contrast to shape their days, tension to keep them on their toes: You are far form me, you are close to me. We are fighting, we are getting along.”