Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

I want an ending that’s satisfying. I’m more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don’t like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." (...) "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.

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.

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.