“She was irritated, briefly, by the thought that she might be becoming more mature. Why should she become a better person when no one else did?”

“But we’ll stumble on, she and I, into our messy future. And we’ll have each other”

“No attack is ever really an attack on the victim. It's the perpetrator attacking an aspect of himself that he loathes. He or she.”

“He wondered how many new starts a person was entitled to, how many times one could say it was the other person's fault and truly believe it.”

“Why treat the people closest to you like strangers?”

“Prejudices are comforting: everyone should make sure to cultivate at least three.”

“What they'd got was a fat, balding academic who bandied about the phrase "family annihilation", especially when there were cameras pointed at him, and mentioned the titles of books and articles he'd written to anyone who would listen; who blatantly thought he was the mutt's nuts, as Sellers had so aptly put it.”