“She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.”

“[Harriet] hated math. She hated math with every bone in her body. She spent so much time hating it that she never had time to do it.”

“She hated her job the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hated herself so there wasn't much point in trying to do better.”

“He was her enemy, and she hated him because she could not hate him enough.”

“You could tell those two had been married by the way that she ignored him.”

“For the last year his grandma had been slipping in and out of reality. One minute she was as clear as a bell and the next she was calling him Simon. Who was Simon? He had no idea.”

“They had met at a club fifteen years before, Etta and Magnus. He had convinced her to dance with him, and she said she had been in love by the end of the song. He told her he had been in love before the beginning.”

“Emily looked at him for a long time. There were so many things she wanted to know—but she wanted not to know them even more. She didn’t want any more answers. He had been the one thing she could trust, the one person she could rely on. She wanted to beg him to be that way again. But it wasn’t him who had changed. It was her. It was her own credulity she really wanted back. And credulity, like virtue, could be lost only once.”

“She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.”

“She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.”