What has mattered, always, is that they’re together, and everything else falls away.

Yvette had never talked about her marriage – she was a smart girl, and she knew you had no right to complain about someone you got all the way to the altar with. You made that choice, even if you were a child when you did it, and the marriage vow was sacred.

Civilization, her mother had told her since she was small, was a series of agreements about what was good for everyone, enforced by law. And civilization was only a thin veneer over the savagery and greed that were the human default.

We’re creating little hedonists,′ Frank used to say. ‘Nothing will be as pleasurable as this for the rest of their lives. They’ll search everywhere for something that can measure up, and nothing will.

He held his hands tightly together and cursed his daughter for bringing the terrible world, with its humiliation and longing, back to his door.

The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?

I baptize you in the name of the conservation of energy. What comes around goes around.

Now, alone on the roof, Valentine looked at her shoes and wished people would either stay or go away, but not constantly coming back and leaving again.

Children were experiments, and his had failed.

There’s a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers,” Bea said. “It’s that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their twenties, they’re pretty much okay, they’ve got a force field around them. I don’t know if Jonna ever had it. I think she’s always known about the bad things.