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

“You were ambitious - for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart. I liked that about you. I liked it enormously.”

“...Remember that nutty little story I told you about the first time I ever went overseas for my junior year abroad at Green Bay, and I stepped onto the airstrip in Madrid to be obscurely disheartened that Spain, too, had trees. Of course Spain has trees! you jeers. I was embarrassed; of course I knew, in a way, it had trees, but with the sky and the ground and the people walking around--well, it just didn't seem that different.”

“Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. Hassle.2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.)3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid's insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.)4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn't say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.)5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I'm a pig.)6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment. Not conclusion.)7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.)8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.)9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew--every woman, too, which is depressing--would take me less seriously.)10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother would feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.)”

“What would I like to get away from? Complexity. Anxiety. A feeling I've had my whole life that at any given time there's something I'm forgetting, some detail or chore, something that I'm supposed to be doing or should have already done. That nagging sensation - I get up with it, I go through the day with it, I go to sleep with it. When I was a kid, I had a habit of coming home from school on Friday afternoons and immediately doing my homework. So I'd wake up on Saturday morning with this wonderful sensation, a clean, open feeling of relief and possibility and calm. There'd be nothing I had to do. Those Saturday mornings, they were a taste of real freedom that I've hardly ever experienced as an adult. I never wake up in Elmsford with the feeling that I've done my homework.”

“I didn't put in my diaphragm' I mumbled when we were through.You stirred, 'Is it dangerous?''It's very dangerous,' I said.Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.”

“These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive.”