These fucking women really piss me off,' April said. 'Because instead of being elated by the thought of making their own happiness and chasing some crazy dream, all they want to do is narrow their options and do something safe.

How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?

The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.

Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.

With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.

And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn't happen. That was just the way life went.

Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.

The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.

Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.

Now she saw that marriage was like being in a three-legged race with the same person for the rest of your life. Your hopes, your happiness, your luck, your moods, all yoked to his.

She had learned over time that to know anything was bearable. It was secrecy that could not be borne.

It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.

We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.

One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.