“What are you going to have?” he asked. “A nervous breakdown,” she muttered and opened her menu. So we’ll tell the waitress to make that a double, he thought.”

“Her laugh was a travesty. Which made sense because in a way, so was his apology. But what was he supposed to say?I want you until I hurt. Until I sweat. I love you with a raw, bleeding need that I've never understood.And all I know for sure is that you can never be mine.”

“He saw clearly the truth other men didn’t. If you gave anyone the power to hurt you, soon enough, they were going to use it.”

“I’m on the benevolent side of antisocial. I don’t mind people, but I’d prefer not to have a lot of them around.”

“I want to go to the mother, take her hand, and tell her that although she and her daughter believe that every bad choice the daughter has ever made in life is her fault, it's not. It's really, really not.”

“When I asked my father whether he thought that it was possible that his mother was raped behind that closed door, he said, "She had washer-woman knees. No one could possibly think of her as a sexual object. Besides," he explained, "she would have told my sisters, and they would have told me." I am not so sure. Maybe someone needed to ask her. Someone needed to want to know, to be able to hear the answer.”

“Nobody gets their period for the first time and has a nervous breakdown next to a Kohler toilet. Men have such stupid ideas about menstruation, don’t they, Julie?”