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1 " Why are instants of reunion so empty? Perhaps because they are so anticipated, too muffled already at the moment of their coming with every previous imagining to make any mark of their own.They refer backwards, to all the length of time that has refined itself as the prologue to cataclysm, and to all the flawed imaginings themselves, in each of which this moment is strangely dilated, expansive, arrested "
― Susan Choi , American Woman
2 " He has already struck the match, his hands cupped to protect the small flame against the currents of the air but also to smuggle more of his body into the exchange, under cover of courtesy. Frazer always cups his hands around the flame and leans near, even when indoors in a place with no drafts. Some men embrace all the retrograde aspects of gallantry because they’ve intuited that to be gallant is to take sexual hold of a woman, however obliquely. She thinks Frazer is one of these men. "
3 " She received the same love he extended to all humankind. He never upbraided her for leaving him, and this rationality of his, whether a put-on or not, was another shocking loss, though she knew it was enormously selfish to want the man that you no longer loved to keep pining for you. He finally, quietly let her go, let three months pass before answering one of her letters. She knew then to stop writing back. "
4 " The loss of her freedom, of these years of her twenties, ended up being nothing next to the loss of her confidence in the choices she’d made. "
5 " She’d stopped fighting and known, as Pauline must have known when she’d joined with her captors, that any bond is its own great salvation, no matter how damning in all other ways. She’d bound herself then to Pauline, and Pauline’s rushing fate. "
6 " And because, Jenny knew, the true bond with a comrade was what she herself craved most of all. It was what, even now, some submerged stubborn part of her feels she had gained, for a time. A perfect comradeship, unlike the farce that the cadre had lived. Unlike, even, Jenny’s previous life with William, in which she had felt herself struggling to keep his approval, and always amazed at his interest in her. With Pauline she had never felt that, but that their mistakes they at least made together, and their remorse they’d at least get to share. Now she prepared to face all of it newly alone. "
7 " The most shocking act, closely examined, is just a louder version of some habitual gesture. No one is ever “out of character.” That idea just makes Frazer laugh. "
