“Marriage is compromise and hard work,and then more hard work and communication and compromise. And then work. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”

“I suppose it's not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like. One of us was always angry.”

“Because I realized I'd be stuck doing all the hard stuff," she reasoned. "All the diapers and doctors' appointments and discipline, and you'd just breeze in and be Fun Daddy. I'd do all the work to make them good people, and you'd undo it anyway, and they'd love you and hate me.”

“People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.”

“The question I've asked more often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I supposed these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking how are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?”

“Worse, I convinced myself our tragedy was entirely her making. I spent years working myself into the very thing I swore she was: a righteous ball of hate.”

“I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”