“What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.”

“She, Laura, likes to imagine (it's one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged. She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair done, it the other women aren't all thinking, to some degree or other, the same thing: Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty.”

“Any other vexations to report?" he asks."I love the word 'vexations.'""It's the 'x.' Nice to jump off a 'v' and bite into an 'x' like that.""Just the usual ones," she says."How was the weekend?""Vexing. Not really, I just wanted to say it. You?”

“Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can't.”

“She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while.”

“What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.”

“What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me & incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.”