“These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.”

“After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep. ”

“Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.”

“This ceremony of approval was a charade - everything had been decided before we got here - and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.”

“We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.”

“The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."...We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.”

“One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.”