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1 " For once, the tears wouldn't come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow. "
― Anne Tyler , The Amateur Marriage
2 " He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller. "
3 " She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners. "
4 " It wasn't what you said", he told her."It was how I felt when you said it". "
5 " Sometimes he fantasised that at the end of his life, he would be shown a home movie of all the roads he had not taken, and where they would have led. "
6 " Walking a small child was like herding water, Michael used to think when his own children were small. Heaven only knew what they'd take into their heads to do next - dart in front of a speeding car or throw a tantrum in mid-traffic or stop to pick a soaked cigar butt out of the gutter. "
7 " And over such a trivial issue, after all their years together! She couldn't even exactly remember the issue! Why that particular one? Why not any of the hundreds of others?Once again Michael hesitated, but then he turned toward the foyer. She heard the front door latch, and a moment later his car lights lit up and backed out of the driveway. She went on staring straight ahead of her. She had a slippery, off-balance feeling, the feeling a person might get if she were sitting on a stopped train and the train next to hers started gliding away and she wasn't sure, for a second, whether it was her train or the other one that was moving. "
8 " She didn’t even know if she liked them, in fact, and perhaps she didn’t like them, but by now it hardly mattered because how would she ever start over with somebody new, at this point? "
9 " because a longtime family joke was how Pauline put so much stock in marking occasions with gifts. Pauline made a shooing gesture with one hand (people tended to exaggerate her character, she felt), and Karen went on. “Mom, Dad, this is from all of us. We wanted to give you something to remind you of these past thirty years.” And she took the package from George "
