You have to shrink yourself to fit into this little life with him.

But then you hear that he can't hear you, you see that he can't see you. You are not here--and you haven't even died yet. You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol on the ladies' room door.

Even now, he is every blue blazer getting into cab, every runner along the river,every motorcycle coming and going.

You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will require all of your energy.It's you who has to hold on to earth. You have to tighten your grip -- which means letting go of him.

They were a couple in a way that didn't exclude anyone but seemed superior to every other relationship in the room.

Up until that moment, I'd been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he'd keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him.

There are things that two people say in the middle of the night That don't make sense to a third at breakfast.

No," he said, and he snapped his fingers. "You'll come work for me at K----. And be a real associate editor."I said, "I could bring you up on charges for that.""What?""Work harassment in the sexual place.

It occurred to me that the quiet in the suburbs had nothing to do with peace.

You can feel like he wants to own you,-not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having.

I'd already figured out that not understanding my failings was another one of my failings.

Archie asked me if I knew Dante's definition of hell..."Proximity without intimacy," he said.

It isn't you,' he says, as though you're to be comforted by the irrelevant role you play in your own life.

Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn't realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me.

Finally, I asked how you got a boy to like you back. She said, 'Just be yourself,' as though I had any idea who that might be.