“I hadn't felt such disgust for a boy since the early days, when they'd tease girls on the playground, kicking us and throwing gravel and raising their voices in high screechy mockery. "They do that because they like you," all the adults said, grinning like pumpkins. We believed them, back then. Back then we thought it was true, and we were drawn toward all that meanness because it meant we were special, let them kick us, let them like us. We liked them back. But now it was turning out that our first instincts were right. Boys weren't mean because they liked you; it was because they were mean.”

“Do you do them in that old-fashioned code,like daffodils mean I’m sorry I was late, daisies mean sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends, these things here fanned out mean just thinking of you?Or did you just have them throw whatever was pretty together?”

“You flew your way through all those stone silent statues, and if I could I'd thunk them all at your goddamn doorstep, as noisy as you were quiet, as furious as we were giggly, as cold and scornful as I was breathless and hot watching you cat burglar for evidence and come back shrugging and empty-handed so we still didn't know, we still couldn't be sure, not until everything was developed...But we never developed them. Undeveloped, the whole thing, tossed into a box before we really had a chance to know what we had, and that's why we broke up.”

“It didn't last, it wasn't clear for much longer, and that's why we broke up, but when I close this book and give it to you, I don't think about that, just us holding the book it our hands to buy it and take it here with us, because damn it Ed, that's not why we broke up. I love it, I miss it, I hate to give it back to you, this complicated thing, it's why we stayed together.”

“The whole thing of what I’ve been trying,” you said, “is that you’re different, and you keep asking about the other girls, but what I mean is that I don’t think about them, because of the way you are.”

“If there was some way of knowing which boys were likely to turn out to be decent men, boys that could love us back as passionately as we felt we could love them, then we could banish the likelihood of divorce and unhappiness to a statistically unlikely outcome.”

“Every last souvenir of the love we had, the prizes & the debris of this relationship, like the glitter in the gutter when the parade has passed, all the everything & whatnot kicked to the curb.”