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”the decline of people’s belief in something showed up in their apparent willingness to believe anything.”

”Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.”

”…but part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other person. This was the opposite to what she had naively imagined, as a girl. To the unmarried, it seemed that a couple must be intimately, perpetually exposed to each other - but actually that wasn’t bearable. In order for love to survive, you has to close yourself off to a certain extent.”

’Yes, it is the most important love [a partner’s love], the love of the mother is a given, it is taken for granted. A child is born and for the rest of his or her life the mother will love the child, without the child doing anything in particular to earn it. But the love of a wife must be earned, to be won in the first place and then kept.’

“Every romance requires a backdrop and an audience, even - or perhaps especially - the genuine ones, romance is not something that a couple can be expected to conjure by themselves you and another, the two of you together, not just once but again and again, love in general is fortified by its context, nourished by the gaze of others.”

“He went in to say what a lot of time it was, and that it sort of blows your load, parenting, because it’s the perfect job - it’s very hard but only you can do it.”

”for the next seventeen hours I went right toward the pain of bringing a nearly ten-pound baby through what had always struck me as a rather narrow passage. When I could finally speak again having come to after the blood lost from all the tearing, and was lying flat out on the bed, trying to sweep together the shredded filaments of my mind, I told someone who called on the phone, curious to know what it had all been like, that I felt like I had met myself in a dark valley. That I had gone down and met myself in the valley of hell.”