“It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.”

“The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red ma...”

“Speech is the voice of the heart.”

“But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.”

“We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”

“Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to...”

“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.”