"...we become compulsive comparers- always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead. Compulsive comparing, of course, only leads to debilitating cases of what Nietzsche calle Lebensneid, or life envy: the certainty that somebody else is much luckier than you, and that if only you had her body, her husband, her children, her job, everything would be easy and wonderful and happy." p.46
"All these choices and all this longing can create a weird kind of haunting in our lives- as though the ghosts of all our other, unchosen, possibilities linger forever in a shadow world around us, continuously asking, Are you certain this is what you really wanted?" p.46
"Real, sane, mature love- the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school- is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect." p.102
"it was not an infatuation, and here's how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life nor did I immediately vanish into that man's chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homunculus." p.106
Dr. Shirley Glass walls & window theory p.108-109
"She had finally married her own life, and not a moment too soon." p.171
