“And so, as the mob backs away to give them space... as the riot police holster their weapons, standing down, and as Risa takes the podium, calming the crowd with a voice as soothing as a sonata, Co...”

“The accountant lingers at his children's doorway a moment more, listening to the easy rhythm of their breathing, and something cold moves through him, like the passage of a ghost - but he know that...”

“Hole..." He grips Risa's hand tighter. "Hole, Risa, hole..." And she smiles "Yes, Connor," she says. "You're whole. You're finally whole.”

“Today he failed to change the world. As for tomorrow, who can tell?”

“I love you, Risa," he says. "Every last part of me.”

“You see, Risa, survival is a dance between our needs and our consciences. When the need is great enough, and the music loud enough, we can stomp conscience into the ground.'Risa closes her eyes. Sh...”

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

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

“It's not about whether or not someone is a bigot, but whether or not the argument which that someone is arguing is worth being a bigot about.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”