What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.