“From Charades: when she was younger she was a frustrated mother, so she is pleased when her children act as is they don't remember”

“It was not miserable - often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I'd felt the same sinking feeling when she was. ”

“Her rage flopped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick-boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and she had been left with her rage--vestigial, girlhood rage--inappropriate and intact. She would hug her parents good-bye, the gentle, emptied sacks of them, and think Where did you go?”

“There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, "What?" Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha—?”

“When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with...”

“She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.”

“When she got to Eileen Reilly, Eileen turned red and said, "I would rather not say." This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street - Stan the Shoe Man, my mother affectionately called him. But his daughter had absorbed some disappointment - his, or her mother's - and did not want to speak of how he earned his living. Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it.”