“Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposedto have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore.”

“Another spell had been thrust upon her so long ago...She hadn't been able to see it but it was real. Otherwise why would you rise up from your enclosed and well-defended self and go be with that other person? Why would you open your life, the most secret entries into yourself, to someone you didn't really know? Who would do that unless she had to?”

“People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.”

“Jill told him that he just didn't understand what it meant to have been so promising your whole life and now to be so disappointing in the end.”

“You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.”

“When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them.”

“To be anorexic...she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.”