Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil. - Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

"He announces that lately he keeps losing things. "Like your wife and child,"I want to say, but don´t. At fourty, I´ve learned not to say everything clever, not to score every point."

"Surprises, I feel now, are primarily a form of violence."

"The snag about marriage is, it isn´t worth the divorce."

"Any way I slice reality it comes out poorly, and I feel an urge to not exist, something I have never felt before; and now here it comes with conviction, almost panic. I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly."

"I love you as the mother of my child": the kiss of death.Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a piece of self."