“There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.”

“Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.”

“Anyway, the apple is essential. How come these hens don't get it? They go to church year after year, they read the Bible, or at least keep it on their bedside table, and then they forget how the first seduction of the first man occured? With an apple, that's how. No man can resist a woman who has an apple in her hand. Its theological. A woman with an apple in her hand is the first woman, the only woman in the world, and he's the first man -he stumbles on love and he can't shake it, never ever ever.”

“Cassie's first thought when she saw the old woman was, What a marvelous thing plastic surgery is. The woman was younger than Althea, but looked fifty years older”

“Once upon a time there was a girl.""Not a princess?!""No, definitely not! She was too smart to be a princess. Tough too...Stronger than anyone realized.""Does she live happily ever after?""Shouldn't there be something in the middle?""I like to read the ending first." (Wicked Lovely)”

“Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”