“By then she was the only one of her seven siblings without a child and quickly approaching thirty (which is like forty when you adjust for inflation since 1980).”

“Two thousand and seven was the year we officially entered our late twenties - the starting line of the death march to menopause.”

“I don't think Michelle [Obama:] minds bein our new muse. I think she gets it. We little brown girls - drunk off The Cosby Show, sobered up by life, and a little suicidal - we need her.”

“What does 'wifey material' even mean when someone at the Washington Post thinks the headline 'Marriage Is for White People?' is okay? The article, of course, became another one of Gina's and my obsessions. The Washington fucking Post was against us now.”

“Crazy astraunaut ladies and fabulous twenty-something black chicks are in the same spaceship: they're aliens among men blasting off to who knows where.”

“It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as 'separateness' and the nearest approach to that selfish state which the laws of life permit is in the intent or motive.”

“People think that food cheers you up, that a doughnut cures all ills, but this only works for trivial complaints. When real disaster strikes, food chokes you.”