“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.” 

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked."

“How empty and emptied I felt walking away with all my words still on his floor. Wanting so badly to pick them back up."

“And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.” 

“We talk about love like it's an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love, we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice.”   This book has such a surplus of delicious quotes that I hardly want to write a review on it. If Carrie Bradshaw were a cannibal, she’d have birthed this. Here are some of my favourite sn

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

“I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.”

“Either no God existed, or there did exist a deity who was monstrous if powerful and futile if powerless.” 

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.” 

"I cannot make you understand. I can't make anyone understand what is happening inside of me. I cannot even explain it to myself." 

“I liked hurting girls. Mentally, not physically, I never hit a girl in my life. Well, once. But that was a mistake. I’ll tell you about it later."

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”

"You say that you love your children above anything else. And yet you are stealing their future. Did you hear what I just said? Is the microphone on? Because I'm beginning to wonder."

“For you, a thousand times over.”

“Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”

“He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.”

“One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.”