“Adele was in everybody’s wish list, and her list of Romeos was nearly as long as the Yellow Pages. Some witty person had suggested that her family needed a system of traffic lights to avoid fatal crashes for the men in her life.”

“It was her problem, and she'd deal with it. Because dealing with personal problems was so fucking high on her list of skills.”

“I'd made a long list of exceptions to cover the area between "ignoring her completely" and "abducting her at knifepoint.”

“Lists comforted her - they gave her a sense of accomplishment - they meant she had control of something.”

“I could add her to the long list of people I didn't understand.”

“He wanted to write urgent love letters to her all day long and crowd the endless pages with desperate, uninhibited confessions of his humble worship and need with careful instructions for administering artificial respiration. He wanted to pour out to her in torrents of self-pity all his unbearable loneliness and despair and warn her never to leave the boric acid or the aspirin in reach of the children or to cross a street against the traffic light. He did not wish to worry her.”