To start with, look at all the books.

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

They're just memories now. Time to write them off.

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.

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.