It is a wonderful, moving, heart-filling experience to sit with the man or woman you love and your beloved children and know that all are happy to be just where they are with each other and loving one another. This doesn't happen very often.

I am interested in the gaps between one piece of sidewalk and the next. I am interested in the things for which we don't always have a name, and the things that are not easy to articulate - the difference between what we think and how we feel.

We finished off a small pie and when we got home I washed the tomato sauce out of her hair, which I had expected, but also out of her underwear, which I think must be the sign that you have really, really enjoyed your lunch.

When I read that I thought, I am almost fifty years old and the rest of my life will be love and loss, and when I look down the road, I see a fat old woman and her dog, is what I see.

Carny people’d punch you in the face before they’d let you tell them your troubles and strangle their own selves before they’d tell you theirs.

You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered.

Amelia said, “I think women – some women – regard matrimony as a highly honorable retreat from the possibility of failure in the larger world.

Whitman said, ‘I am as bad as the worst but, thank God, I am as good as the best.’ You ought to spend more time with people who know how bad they are.

We protected America from what happened, like a man takes care of his wife. The man doesn’t mind when she closes her eyes at the scary part of the ride, of the movie. He loves her for that sweet, willful ignorance. She gives him something to protect, a nice world in which bad things don’t happen. It’s a pleasure, and a relief, to keep that ignorance intact, even as it comes between them.

Mrs. Vandor said, with her eyes closed, I wouldn’t make that kind of thing a habit. One wishes to be useful, but not indispensably so.