119 Quotes by J. Courtney Sullivan

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.

And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn't happen. That was just the way life went.

It wasn't right that you could only understand your parents' pain once you'd experienced the things they had, and by then they were gone.

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

Each of Nora's children had arrived on this earth as him or herself, the more she knew them, the more she felt it to be true. They were so different from one another, and from her.

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

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.

Nothing had just happened to her, she had made a choice, and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life.

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.