“If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.”

“What would she be saying if she did? That she did want to marry him? For ten years, at least, since she was twelve or thirteen, Rosa had been declaring roundly to anyone who asked that she had no intention of getting married, ever, and that if she ever did, it would be when she was old and tired of life. When this declaration in its various forms had ceased to shock people sufficiently, she had taken to adding that the man she finally married would be no older than twenty-five. But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives. She didn't suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought to not want to. But did she?”

“A cop? You married a bloody cop?""I married a bloody criminal," Eve muttered, "but nobody ever thinks of that.”

“No one ever complained about a fat brain. No one ever accused their brain of being too short or too tall, too wide or too narrow. Or ugly. It either worked or it didn't, and mine worked just fine.”

“The proper behaviour all through the holiday season is to be drunk. The drunkenness culminates on New Years’ Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.”

“(Henry requests Sin marry Caledonia)I would sooner geld myself. Drunk. With a dull knife. (Sin)”