Virgilia Peterson quotes:

Words have their genealogy, their history, their economy, their literature, their art and music, as too they have their weddings and divorces, their successes and defeats, their fevers, their undiagnosable ailments, their sudden deaths. They also have their moral and social distinctions.

I can understand that memory must be selective, else it would choke on the glut of experience. What I cannot understand is why it selects what it does.

In Reno, there is always a bull market, never a bear market, for the stocks and bonds of happiness.

Love by its presence, like God by His, makes everything not necessarily clear or right or even good, but acceptable. Whereas in its absence, as in His, there is no hope.

Perhaps it is the expediency in the political eye that blinds it.

A lady, that is an enlightened, cultivated, liberal lady - the only kind to be in a time of increasing classlessness - could espouse any cause: wayward girls, social diseases, unmarried mothers, and/or birth control with impunity. But never by so much as the shadow of a look should she acknowledge her own experience with the Facts of Life.

However often marriage is dissolved, it remains indissoluble. Real divorce, the divorce of the heart and nerve and fiber, does not exist, since there is no divorce from memory.

Not only are there as many conflicting truths as there are people to claim them; there are equally multitudinous and conflicting truths within the individual.

There is no plummet to sound another's soul.

Were marriage no more than a convenient screen for sexuality, some less cumbersome and costly protection must have been found by this time to replace it. One concludes therefore that people do not marry to cohabit; they cohabit to marry. They do not seek freedom to rut so much as they seek the rut of wedlock.