gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.