Some strangers become more important to you than family, maybe because you're not expected to love them. You can leave them whenever you want to. They can, too. Every moment together is a choice.

Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

Love is a powerful painkiller.

I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping.

The best anti-depressant pill for me would be one the size of a house so you could drop it on me and put me out of my misery.

He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.