“I can't leave her there all alone, surrounded by stone walls… She's too precious to give up.”

“She wanted to leave. I loved her too much to make her stay.”

“You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her…”

“Then he left her there, standing alone, surrounded by word ghosts; things she could have said.”

“She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.”

“Come on we're going for a ride bitch (No!) Sit up front (Well, we can't just leave Hailie alone, what if she wakes up?) We'll be right back... Well I will, you'll be in the trunk”

“We turned us into wintergirls, and when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone.”

“[The cat] and I have an agreement: I leave her alone and don't make sudden moves when I wake up to find her perched on my chest, staring with an unblinking hostile gaze at my face and in return she rarely mutilates me.”

“She had not made a decision to give up sex, only the clamor of romance, because it was exhausting her, doing her no good and too much harm…”

“Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.”