“So what's the secret to staying together?" I asked her. "Be nice?" she offered. I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don't leave. That's all.”

“...there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again.”

“The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.”

“(Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.)”

“By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made ...”

“...even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall.”

“If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way with...”

“When we are at peace within our marriage, the effects can be astounding! We will raise happier children, become better employees, and overall find the joy in life.”

“Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.”

“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.”

“Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he'd grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it.”

“But sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage. Like rage, it burns hot; and like rage it tends to consume its own furnace.”