“...women giving birth seemed very often to lose any sense of fear or misgiving...exhibiting an absorption that amounted to indifference-simply because they had no attention to spare for anything beyond the universe bounded by their bellies.”

“Women were complicated creatures. Any man who thought he had one figured out simply wasn’t paying attention,”

“When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either.”

“He had lived a very long time, and only since he gained Anna had he learned to fear. He’d discovered that he had never been brave before—just indifferent. She had taught him that to be brave, you have to fear losing something.”

“But the monotonous life led by invalids often makes them like children, inasmuch as they have neither of them any sense of proportion in events, and seem each to believe that the walls and curtains which shut in their world, and shut out everything else, must of necessity be larger than anything hidden beyond.”

“We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor.”