Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)

You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.

Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.