“The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses.”

“I had seen this exact same expression and movement before - where? In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love - the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper.”

“Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.”

“I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!”

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

“I don't have a love life. I have a like life.'Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...”

“I didn't want to, even in my imagination, even for a second, to conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless that she had once given me - to have! to know! to wear! - her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten.”