My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.

...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.

My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations.

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.

He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.