“She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said that she expected to be “beheaded” someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she’d replaced. Her children were “probably” dying of trichinosis from pork she’d undercooked. She wondered if her “addiction” to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her “never” reading books anymore. She confided that she’d been “forbidden” to fertilize Walter’s flowers after what had happened “last time.”

“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.”

“compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.”

“Wow, thank you so much for the compliment!" Patty answered brightly, to end things. At the time, she believed that it was because she was so selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments made her so uncomfortable. The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.”

“I had a nightmare about the Averys’ sweet-tempered German shepherd, Ina. In the dream, as I was sitting on the floor in the Averys’ living room, the dog walked up to me and began to insult me. She said I was a frivolous, cynical, attention-seeking “fag” whose entire life had been phony. I answered her frivolously and cynically and chucked her under the chin. She grinned at me with malice, as if to make clear that she understood me to the core. Then she sank her teeth into my arm. As I fell over backward, she went for my throat.”

“she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.”

“She has embarrassingly inquired, of her children, whether there's a woman in his life, and has rejoiced at hearing no. Not because she doesn't want him to be happy, not because she has any right or even much inclination to be jealous anymore, but because it means there's some shadow of a chance that he still thinks, as she does more than ever, that they were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best thing.”