“Alone again, Beverly relaxed somewhat. It was hard to believe that life could get any worse than this. More than once lately, she had thought about killing herself, erasing the fact that she had ever existed. It would be so easy, so—except that she wouldn’t. She didn’t respect people who committed suicide.”

“I think it is better to know the worst, rather than trying to imagine it.”

“Pia was blackmailed into committing a crime more suicidal than she could possibly have imagined, and she had no one to blame but herself.”

“Her life, she knew, was becoming simplified into an unbreakable chain of habits, a series of orderly actions at regular hours. Vaguely, she thought of herself as a happy woman; yet she was aware that this monotony of contentment had no relation to what she had called happiness in her youth. It was better perhaps; it was certainly as good; but it measured all the difference between youth and maturity.”

“She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, her spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it.”

“She wanted happily ever after more than he could possibly know. She wanted forever. Problem was, she just wasn’t sure she believed in it anymore. It was why she clung to her fiction so much. She immersed herself in books because there she could be anyone and it was easy to believe in love and happily ever after”

“No one had ever left me so simultaneously relaxed and knotted up all at once (except maybe Rhett Butler, which doesn't count since he's not a real person).”