“Ding Gou’er was born in 1941 and married in 1965. It was garden variety marriage, with husband and wife getting along well enough, and producing one child, a darling little boy. He had a mistress who was sometimes adorable and sometimes downright spooky. Sometimes she was like the sun, at other times he moon. Sometimes she was a seductive feline, at other times a mad dog. The idea of divorcing his wife appealed to him, but not enough to actually go through with it. Staying with his mistress was tempting, but not enough to actually do it. Anytime he took sick, he fantasized the onset of cancer, yet was terrified by the thought of the disease; he loved life dearly, and was tired to death of it. He had trouble being decisive. He often stuck the muzzle of his pistol against his temple, then brought it back down; another frequent site of this game was his chest, specifically the area over his heart. One thing and one thing only pleased him without exception or diminution: investigating and solving criminal cases.”

“Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. ‘The Spirit is a garden,’ said he”

“Sometimes it is pleasant for a husband to have a jealous wife: he always hears what he loves being talked about.”

“When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”

“Sometimes this fellow's music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.”

“Sometimes, a wife must do what her husband cannot.”

“I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.”

“She glared at him, feeling the old frustration. Sometimes in his presence she felt the deepest connection to him, and other times she felt completely alone-as though any bond to him was her own bitter imagination.”

“You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”

“A battered wife is a married woman until she gets a divorce. Or until she kills the bastard.”