But to anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and … - Richard Ford

It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither.

In their faces — plenty of them were handsome, but ruined — I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

And now, while he didn't particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn't really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person — of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself — while not exactly a lie since it existed someplace if only as an idea (in his parents' life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unfortunately gone. Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her — the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke.