“This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.”

“This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)”

“Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.”

“Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistuinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?”

“We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.”

“Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?”

“Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story.”