Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can be different from being what you’d like them to be, although often they turn out the same

We marry to grow up, to escape our parents and to inherit our share of the world, not knowing who we are and who we will become, so it is left to marriage to make it clear which ones of us are growing in the same directions and which are ships meant to have passed in the night.

Cynicism is a form of cowardice, a failure of courage to hope.

The romantic myth is so strong that it survives the wear and tear of marriage by simply detaching from it and floating up on ahead, and women who are rather fond of the men they married, as well as ones who are not, go through life with a bag packed for the day when the shining knight on a white charger arrives, just in case he does.

It takes a lot of mulch, love does, to create a froth.

Girls gave sex to get love and boys gave love to get sex and conning girls was the favorite indoor sport.

There are many pages in the book, many kinds of lives we each can live, many ways to be rich, and even more to be poor.