Commencement

“Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.”

“She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.”

“We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.”

“The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.”

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.”

“She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.”

“These fucking women really piss me off,' April said. 'Because instead of being elated by the thought of making their own happiness and chasing some crazy dream, all they want to do is narrow their options and do something safe.”

“There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old.”

“If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.”

“I think we're just different sorts of people, me and you. You're a planner. Everything has to be perfectly aligned before you make a move, or you're afraid the whole damn world will come crashing down. For me, it's more like, "We're having a baby. Now what?”

“Kids are amazing. The first few months, they're just like these loaves of bread that shit. You're wondering what the hell you got yourself into. But then, they turn into people. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.”

“Once this kid came into the world, Sally knew, she would live in constant terror of somehow injuring or losing her. Having her tucked deep inside her belly was the safest she would ever feel about the child, and even that was scary.”

“You could sell crack on the street and go to jail for decades. Or you could sell a woman, and be back out by morning.”

“All over the planet women were being tormented, yet if you took sexism seriously, you were a bore, an idiot, or a pain in the ass.”

“April's just a Dixie cup of crazy. Lydia's more like a twenty-gallon tank”

“How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?”

“Bree knew this habit of hers rankled Lara more than any other--her ability to make a decision and announce that there would be no further discussion was, in Lara's opinion, 'Cruel and selfish behavior, the type usually enacted by men with small penises.”

“With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.”

“A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.”

“She often wondered what the hell was wrong with men. Sex could be fun, natural, good. Why did they have to corrupt it? Why did so many of them prefer to have sex with a victim or a child rather than a willing partner? For that matter, why was it better to have sex with a stranger than with your own wife?”

“Sometimes April worried that she'd been built without some fundamental piece that everyone else had that just let them deal. Even her mother, who got involved in every lefty cause she could, seemed to be able to shake it all off at the end of the day and enjoy life. But the evil in the world, everywhere you looked, was always on April's mind.”

“And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to approve of it.”

“It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it.”

“I think she's gone. And I hate that life just keeps going anyway.”

“No matter what you choose, you have to give something else up.”