“I'm saying she looks fine on the outside, but inside is somebody who's going to need a man a lot more than he's going to need her.”

“It's like picking the place you're going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blindfold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart.' Sullenly Judith said, `I don't believe I have a lucky dart,' and her mother cast an unhappy smile her way and said, `You will, though.”

“Even as Camille's beauty and precocity took form, when pride alone might have nurtured proprietary feelings, she never seemed quite the child Judith was meant to call her own.”

“It is the first shower that wets." "Marriage is like picking the place where you're going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blind fold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart." "Our marriage, like all marriages, was happy until it wasn't”

“She was surprised at how deflating his presence was.”

“Adolescence is a skin we never quite shed.”

“You know, for a while there we kept horses for the boys, and we had a mare that had broken down. Couldn't ride it... You could feed it and brush it and water it and all. Sometimes, I've thought that's what most marriages get to. A horse you still care a little about but cannot any longer ride.”