The plates come in all shapes and colors mix and match.

Simplify with just a couple of flowers. You don't have to do a whole big arrangement.

Her mother chose to martyr herself to some domestic goddess routine that everybody else in the world had wised up to long ago.

She'd permed her hair to within an inch of its life. When she moved her head, the mass of hair followed along behind her a split second later."Perhaps you had to live through the late 70's, early 80's to appreciate this.

After all, your head only had so much room in it. No surprise if it overflowed once in a while with little bits of sparkle and electrical fizz.

We were afraid of so many things: Of our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures, zombies and cartoon killers and thuggish music. Of our neighbors, who were buying gold and ammunition and great quantities of freeze-dried food, and who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers.

His heart cracked open and flooded all the space around it.

I am a tourist of the emotions, visiting only the most well-worn spots. It is romantic, that is, a distortion, to imagine whole lives from the barest observation.

But it was hard not to think of her mother as she moved from the sink to the oven and back again, tasting and chopping and doing her best impersonation of her mother. She felt, not a presence, exactly. Something more earthbound, a better understanding, perhaps, of her mother and the life she lived. The endless small chores, the worries, never enough time, and always the barely movable obstacles of her husband and children.

Why did people get married seeking a way out of loneliness? There was nothing more lonelier than two married people in a room together.- p.126