“So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I'd forgotten to communicate?”

“In particular, husbands and wives who do poorly at nonverbal communication tend to be dissatisfied with their marriages. Moreover, when such problems occur, it's usually the husband's fault .In the first ingenious study of this sort, Patricia Noller (1980) found thathusbands in unhappy marriages sent more confusing messages and made more decoding errors than happy husbands did. There were no such differences among the wives, so the poorer communication Noller observed in the distressed marriages appeared to be the husbands' fault. Men in troubled marriages were misinterpreting communications from their wives that were clearly legible to total strangers.Even worse, such husbands were completely clueless about their mistakes; they assumed that they were doing a fine job communicating with their wives, and were confident that they understood their wives and that their wives understood them. The men were doing a poor job communicating and didn't know it, and that's why they seemed to be at fault.”

“Fortunately, by the time I'd gotten to the stairs I had finished gasping and stepping on dead people, so I was pretty prepared for the next thing to startle me out of my skin.”

“It hurt, remembering. Hurt because there was so much I'd done, so much I'd yet to do. In so many different ways, I now realized, not remembering had been a blessing. A brief respite in the twisted bloody mess that my life had become.But at least I knew who I was.”

“It would have broken my heart if it hadn't been so damn familiar. I guess I'd gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber.”

“Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.”