“A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.”

“I don't understand why doctors don't advise everybody to lay on twenty extra pounds while they've got the chance. I might not advocate outright obesity, but there's a reason for fat - it's a resource.”

“Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.”

“And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk.”

“You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.”

“Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.”

“Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.”