A successful marriage was a balancing act-that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation.

When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.

Mijn vaders stelling : als jij hen nodig hebt, kom dan vijf minuten te vroeg. Als zij jóu nodig hebben, kom dan vijf minuten te laat.

He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn't.

There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

It's a hard life if you don't weaken.

People who leave their drugs in a bathroom the guests use are just asking for trouble.

Loss changes you. Sometimes that's bad. Sometimes it's good. Either way, you eat your goddam pork chop and go on.

[...] in his experience, reversion was the nature of things-people who had given up smoking (he touched the cigarette cocked behind his ear without being aware of it) wanted to go on smoking, and pictures that had been hanging crooked since Nixon was President wanted to go on hanging crooked.