Bokelskere.no

There were twenty-two buttons, he remembered, because instead of listening to her he’d counted the tiny black buttons, which he thought made her look like a cluster of black-eyed Susans.

[…]As if a man could feel anything,” Margo said. “If men could feel anything at all, they wouldn’t all want to own women.”

Back then he’d assumed that once you got married you stayed married. After Carla left the first time, she did return, but then she just kept on leaving until she was finally too exhausted from all that leaving to come back.

She’d try to avoid Rachel; talking to that girl was like rubbing up against poison ivy.

Life should be like a wedding, she thought, so you always knew what to do and say next.

How could words, the simple truth, cut through you like the bitterest cold or the fastest river current?

Harold knew then, he said, sitting in that barn, that life is both too short to have enough joy and too brutally long for a man who regrets what he has done.

Sally had tried a few times recently to quit smoking—namely when she’d run out of cigarettes. At Mike’s insistent nagging, she’d also tried to quit drinking once about three years ago, but she didn’t intend to try that again.