Daphne Merkin quotes:

Then again, as those who suffer from it know, intractable depression creates a planet all its own, largely impermeable to influence from others except as shadow presences, urging you to come out and rejoin the world, take in a movie, go out for a bite, cheer up.

Everyone lies about sex, more or less, to themselves if not to others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance or minimizing its pull.

There's something stubborn about families, unhappy ones in particular: they outlive themselves, and then they live on.

It was through reading that I discovered the crucial, even sacrosanct place the rituals of drinking held in the American imagination - the ingenious way alcohol seemed to lubricate everything from onerous chitchat to self-conscious sexual advances.

Naturally, our own irrational demands strike us as having the force of needs, while other people's needs strike us as capricious indulgences.

Much as I try to disguise myself, there is never a time when I'm not aware of being overweight.

My mother is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.

No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.