“He felt a momentary pang of regret that he had not spent more time with his beloved wife. But it passed when he remembered that the reason he’d gone to sea in the first place was that he had never really liked his beloved wife.”

“As he bent closer, he realized they were words -- words his wife had carved into the cave ice with the last of her dying strength. As he read them, he felt them like three hard blows in the stomach.
KILL THE CHILD”

“I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn't I? The least I could have done was to have the decency to have turned out a little more like him.”

“Sometimes he felt like he'd been gone his whole life--in exile, away from the place he was supposed to be, and that, soldier-like, he was pining to be returned. Homesick for a place he'd never been.”

“…Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

“A man … found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.”

“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”

“From a woman’s perspective, sharing parent time feels like what a man might experience if his ex-wife came to his office and shared his career. He might claim the sharing is not in the best interests of the employer. But what he really would be caring about is the affront should his ex-wife do as good as he at his own job. While the fear is understandable, the difference is that his career is his, their children are theirs.”

“The reason for his anguish, the intolerable burden which had broken him at last, was the simplest thing in the world: he loved his wife. He always had, and he always would. Nothing could change that, but that was what had made his agony bite so deep, the reason he couldn't forgive himself for not somehow making things "all right" again… and the reason he'd had to turn to someone else to rebuild himself when the collapse came. It had been cowardly of him, in many ways, but he simply could not have made himself dump his weakness, his collapse on her shoulders while she coped with everything God had already done to her.”

“He loved his wife but hated what life with her had become, cursing himself for even thinking this way.”