“Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.”

“You only live at once." Which seemed to her all the more reason to be careful, to take it easy, to have an ordinary life.”

“She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural-a seamless extension of her angry feral self.”

“Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.”

“I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.”

“Sometimes it seemed that she and rudy were two people attempting to tango, sweating and trying, long after the orchestra had grown tired, long after everyone else had gone home.”

“The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches. ”