On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

The window was still open.” Mr Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close it or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.

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.

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.

My goal in life is to become an adjective.

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.