Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?

She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted something to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.

The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.

A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn't mean there'd be any way to keep from knowing it was there.

People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering.