But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.

was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?

Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence

Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.

How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

My biggest fear, I think falling from a great height. If I want to keep myself awake at night I imagine I'm on the top of the North or South Tower in 9/11, wondering whether I'm going to be burnt to death or I'm going to jump. And I think I would burn to death. And yet I'm impressed by the fact that hundreds didn't.