This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)

You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.

Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't this world would end at once.

I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.

It is easy to crush an enemy outside oneself but impossible to defeat an enemy within.

A wave isn't like a skate ramp or mountain; everything's moving around, and you have to time how to move along with it. That's easier with a slow wave.

Volleyball was the hardest thing Ive ever had to do.

I honestly don't feel that it's my music that's under-appreciated. I think that it's me that's under-appreciated. As an artist, period.

Science is about predictions based on predictable fact. Life is about surprises based on the unpredictable reality.

He who does a kindness to an ungrateful person, sets his seal to a flint and sows his seed upon the sand; on the former he makes no impression, and from the latter finds no product.

It's here, where absolute evil was perpetrated, that the will must resurface for a fraternal world, a world based on respect of man and his dignity.