“They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me.”

“Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound.”

“We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.”

“This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!”

“In so many things I loved I was sadly insufficiently gifted and driven. But writing I could plod along with -- and no one discouraged me. People were much kinder. I headed toward the kindness.”

“His eyes were caught in the headlights of something - foreign policy?”

“The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.”