“What’s with her?” says the painter. “She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction. I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.”

“When I’m introduced to a woman for the first time, I always say the same thing. I say, “Hi, I’m Jarod, and I think you’ll love my kids. You’d better, because you’re going to give birth to them.” This usually works, because after I say this I can immediately go back to being an introvert, as I’m left standing there all alone. 
”

“I’m mad at you because I love you, not because I want you dead.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked."Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.""How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice."You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”

“I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.”

“If you’re mad that I kissed you, I won’t apologize for that.”“No, I’m mad you stopped.” Her face flushed. “I meant,” she tried to rephrase, “I’m mad you left the way you did.”