“Tone was all. Gift wrap was all. Perfect the wrap, and you could put whatever you wanted in the box. You could put firecrackers. You could put dog shit. ”

“When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet. ”

“Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce”

“When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip.”

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

“Forget being a decent man, Terence. Go for castability. Could you even play a decent man in a movie?”

“I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.”