Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.

Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.

The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.

...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.

For the living, death is thievery.