“Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.”

“[Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved”

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”

“The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.”

“Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions.”

“She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong he’d been and how right she’d been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day.”

“The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn't help being disappointments to each other, because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to both of them. Every time Patty lay by herself after sex, she sank down into sadness and loneliness, because Richard was always going to be Richard, whereas with Walter, there had always been the possibility, however faint, and however slow in its realization, that their story would change and deepen.”