But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests.

A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.