“But since a person's deepest fantasies were formed by their more or less screwed up childhoods, it made sense that anything based on them would end up in betrayal.”

“I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn't quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around here, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing - the opposite of my childhood - and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didn't matter what happened to you as a girl: you ended up the same.”

“Teachers wondered why I didn't speak up more in class. Why would I when I knew how precarious words could be, how betraying they were, how vulnerable they made you?”

“Love is irrational, I reminded myself. The more you loved someone, the less sense anything made.”

“...to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster.”

“It was the stop that happened when you made up your mind to confess, but your mouth betrayed you in the end.”