Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.

Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.