"...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one."
- Lionel Shriver
"Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't."
"To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention."
"How lucky we are, when we are spared what we think we want!"
"Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd -- slavery, incest, a suicide -- I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I've learned since that..."
"I can’t imagine that I’m supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leav..."
"Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed."
"For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in anaccumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimismwere more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It washard to..."
"A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it."
"Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn't the real problem, th..."