Every marriage, every family, has its mysteries.

Women always reveal their deepest secrets to each other.

You can think something is one way all your life, and it turns out you're wrong, it can be something else entirely.

Nothing is rigid. Things change. You can change your mind. You can change your thinking.

You think terrible things happened on the battlefields, but terrible things happened in ordinary suburban homes.

Not all mysteries are meant to be solved. Not all secrets are meant to be told.

People can do what they like in the privacy of their own homes.

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.

The United States is a giant island of freedom, achievement, wealth, and prosperity in a world hostile to our values.

The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes— forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.