“They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving,”

“It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.”

“There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.”

“Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.”

“if making things seem prettier than they are is a lie, then making them seem uglier must be another.”

“Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.”

“For Miles, one of the great mysteries of marriage was that you had to actually say things before you realized they were wrong. Because he'd been saying the wrong thing to Janine for so many years, he'd grown wary, testing most of his observations in the arena of his imagination before saying them out loud, but even then he was often wrong. Of course, the other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get. Wrong, all of it, to one degree or another, by definition, or by virtue of the fact that Miles himself was the one saying it.”