“I'm starting to believe that happily ever after includes people doing things that upset each other. We all get cranky, or impatient, or worried, or careless enough to do or say things that hurt someone else. Like it or not, that's normal. We can't blame it all on Olympia's bad energy. The important part is that we feel sorry about what we've done and make up for it. That's something Olympia never did.”

“But it's tempting, isn't it, to give somebody like Olympia or Fenleigh a taste of their own medicine? To get even?'I agree it's tempting. *Really* tempting. But it doesn't solve anything. It just perpetuates the problem by making us as bad as them. And we don't need any more of them, do we?”

“And they lived happily (aside from a few normal disagreements, misunderstandings, pouts, silent treatments, and unexpected calamities) ever after.”

“I know it's important to do more than just complain when there's something you don't like. You need to try to do something about it, or you're nothing but a whiner.”

“We thanked each other. It was customary after every exchange. Our thanks were never disingenuous or ironic. We said thanks for getting this done so quickly, thanks for putting in so much effort. We had a meeting and when a meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting. Very rarely did we say anything negative or derogatory about meetings. We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.”

“She said, "As long as we're with each other--""We know we're in exactly the right place," he finished.”

“Nobody ever gets enough appreciation when they're behaving themselves, but there's no end to hearing about it when they're not. ”