I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.

I also liked to look around at the houses surrounding the park and wonder about the people who filled them, what kinds of marriages they had and how they loved or hurt each other on any given day, and if they were happy, and whether they thought happiness was a sustainable thing.

I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.

At twenty-eight I'd had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.

And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.

My life was my life; I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.

... and yet he could also be very charming, in a bookish, infinitely apologetic way.