“You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”

“It really is true. It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.”

“She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily. I'd know her head anywhere.And what's inside it. I think of that, too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy?”

“She'll never really let me go. She likes the game too much.""Then stop playing it.”

“I got it, Go said. Go home, fuck her brains out, then smack her with your penis and scream, There's some wood for you bitch!”

“To spend a life in dreams, that sounded too lovely.”

“I have never been a nag. I have always been rather proud of my un-nagginess. So it pisses me off, that Nick is forcing me to nag. I am willing to live with a certain amount of sloppiness, of laziness, of the lackadaisical life. I realize I am more type A than Nick, and I try not to inflict my neat-freaky, to-do-list nature on him. Nick is not the kind of guy who is going to think to vacuum or clean out the fridge. He truly doesn't see that kind of stuff. Fine. Really. But I do like a certain standard of living - I think it's fair to say the garbage shouldn't literally overflow, the plates shouldn't sit in the sink for a week with smears of bean burrito dried on them. That is just being a good grown-up roommate. And Nick's doing anything anymore, so I nag, and it pisses me off: You are turning me into what I never have been and never wanted to be, a nag because you are not living up to your end of a very basic compact. Don't do that, It's not ok to do.”