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.

But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.

Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.

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

Just because we're related doesn't mean we are any good at understanding each other.

In real life I avoid all parties altogether, but on paper I can mingle with the best of them