... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.

Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.

Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed-guilty they hadn't accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.