“Saying it it loud, she felt every inch of distance between them.”

“You're saying things you can't take back. And you don't even mean them.”

“I wanted her note to say that I was a red hole dug out of the guts of her, a seeping wound that hadn’t healed a lick in the twenty-odd years since she had left me.”

“She had shown Laura that David was less hers than she had ever thought and the pieces of him she did own were being taken.”

“sex was where laurel knew she knew him, and talking was the way she called him to her.”

“I step straight toward the female librarian. She looks soft, as if she's been raised in a box and purely milk-fed, like veal.”

“That was normal. That was regular and real.. It didn't look like a place [she] could get to from here.”