“As a witness at the door of your parents’ room, you learned every argument is a circling around the same unnamed problem. A raised voice is a shunned voice is a measured voice.”

“Her life is not a goddamn movie. How’s this for plot? Fires erupt when people aren’t paying attention.”

“Being alive, she thought, just being alive and a woman was enough to make her vengeful protagonist behave as she did. Ruth didn’t need to dial it up. She didn’t need to change a word.”

“Up here he no longer needed to hide his voice.”

“The beach was empty, the water calm, but on a pole a few meters from shore a red flag was waving.”

“In the factory—she had immediately understood—overwork drove people to want to have sex not with their wife or husband in their own house… but there, at work, morning or afternoon.”