“The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.”

“She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.”

“She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.”

“Some women were created to make other women feel like shit about themselves.”

“And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to approve of it.”

“Once this kid came into the world, Sally knew, she would live in constant terror of somehow injuring or losing her. Having her tucked deep inside her belly was the safest she would ever feel about the child, and even that was scary.”

“Ruby shook her head, but she smiled, a look that said she loved this man, loved the life they had made together. They seemed utterly comfortable with one another, like they knew each other all the way through.”