“Of course I recognized it. How could I not, for I had read it goodness knows how many times. 'Jane Eyre,' I said wonderingly. 'You recognized it? Yes, it is. I asked a man in a library. It's by Charlotte someone. She had a lot of sisters, apparently.”

“When I was up she taught me to recognize the feeling and savor it. “Remember how good you feel now,” she said. “There will be times later on when everything will seem bleak. I don’t want to minimize the grim and harsh times. I know how bad you feel then. But they won’t last forever. Capture the good moments,” she said.”

“Courtship? Had I said courtship? What did I think, that this was Jane freakin' Eyre?”

“On Saturday mornings during deliveries, I'd practice picking out new words in Jane Eyre, sounding out the ones that needed sounding out—and I'm not lying, there were plenty. "'A new servitude! There is something in that,' I soliloquized." I mean, who talks like that? Do you know how long it takes to sound out a word like soliloquized? And even after you do, you have no idea what the stupid word means except that it probably just means "said," which is what stupid Charlotte Brontë should have said in the first place. When I delivered Mrs. Mason's groceries, she saw that I had Jane Eyre stuck under my arm. "Oh," she said, "that was my favorite novel in school." "It was?" I soliloquized.”

“I know," she said, guessing my thoughts. "I know exactly how you feel.""Does it get easier?" I asked. Unlike Sydney, Olena had an answer."Yes. But you'll never be the same.”

“Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.”