The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.

She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." -- Willing

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.

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.