I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and then I didn't want to use it up, because what do you wish for then?

She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?

I think there is still pressure to marry. I think there is still pressure to have children. If you're middle or upper class, those pressures exist at a later age now.

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.

We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we’ll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear.

I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors