“Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership.”

“A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.”

“What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar.”

“Monica was glad Walter was married, so she didn’t have to go into any of the other reasons she didn’t want to get involved with him, such as the fact that he had the intellectual depth of mayonnaise.”

“I asked you to conquer your fear, but all you did was give in to it. If you were in love with her, that would be one thing. Love is something to be afraid of, but this, this is embarrassing. So she talks too much, so she's too enthused about every little thing, so what? Get in, get your question answered, and get out. Stand up to her, for cryin' out loud!”

“When she’d been with us a month or so, Lisa Cody got a diagnosis. She was a sociopath too. She was happy, because she wanted to be like Lisa in all things. Lisa was not so happy, because she had been the only sociopath among us. “We are very rare,” she told me once, “and mostly we are men.””

“She's been married so many times she's got rice marks all over her face”

“She had gone so far now, she had broken so many rules and said such wicked things, that she knew she would suffer the most severe punishment; and since what was done could not be undone, she was free to be as bad as she wanted to be.”

“At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.”

“When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.”