"Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though interior shift…"

"One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you're sure y…"

"Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with…"

"People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conv…"

"In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Mi…"

""I'm not worried," I said. And I wasn't, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I was wrong, it is s…"

"When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in t…"

"It's probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents."

"You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better."

"And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware …"