"By the end, people around you will be dying off, and they will be thinking about their own deaths and the deaths of their partners so entirely that they won't have time to notice what you have accomplished, or how you managed to live such a faultless life, they're just going to be thinking about how their wife is dying, or how their husband has died, or about how there's nobody in the world who will love them as much or understand them so well, while you will be sitting here all alone with your great pride over the life you have crafted, and the work you have made, and everything you did to make yourself so perfect and good. By which I mean, not having children, being with the wrong man, having no love in the end, and being sort of penniless and maybe ignored."
"As a child I read Jane Eyre, and again later, as a university student. It is, above all, a novel about submission. Confinement and submission—zones of submission. All spaces in the novel are enclosures of female submission...each a zone of submission and indoctrination to familial tyranny, institutional and religious doctrine, and white masculinity. The major ethical event is how Jane will resist or inhabit these zones of submission: the love plot is what follows."
"The inexchangeable pleasure of her conversation. Just to walk the streets saying things, anything, just the act itself, walking together at the same speed, and talking, purely to amuse and please one another, to make each other stupidly laugh, for no further accomplishment, no higher purpose, to let their words rise and disperse forever in the damp brackish air."
"Leslie and I got past compatibility, to that place where you surprise yourself with how badly you want to stay in that liminal pocket together, how desperate and unattractive you're willing to be to experience uncompromised joy."
