Marriage, Family, and Social Norms Theme Analysis

There’s no better way to get people to cooperate in this country than by seeming a little unhinged.

Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not to a different airport. “Motherhood,” I condensed in the park. “Now, that is a foreign country.”

How lucky we are, when we’re spared what we think we want!

I was visiting your country. The one you had made for yourself, the way a child constructs a log cabin out of Popsicle sticks.

“It’s very dangerous,” I said. Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.

Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket.

When you lifted the needle peremptorily, you scratched a groove, so that forever after the song would skip and keep repeating, Baby what did you expect…

I panicked, thinking, There’s nowhere to hide.

After all, you practiced rounding up on Kevin from the day he was born. Me, I’m a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus.

You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it’s the fault of somebody who’s dead.

Impatient with the slow pace of made-for-TV combat, he grumbled, “I don’t see why Cone Power bothers with all that little junk, Dad. Nuke ‘em. That’d teach the Raqis who’s boss.” You thought it was adorable.

“Like how?” he said, carefully pulling the rough salmon-colored husk off the fruit, exposing the pinkish-white flesh. “Celia does not look like a geek?” When the pale translucent orb was peeled, he popped it in his mouth, sucked, and pulled it back out.

When you love your kids, and you’re there for them, and you take them on trips, like to museums and battlefields, and make time for them, you have faith in them and express an interest in what they think? That’s when this kind off plunging off the deep end doesn’t happen. And if you don’t believe me, ask Kevin.

Almost to, what, know you’re alive. To show other people they don’t control you. To prove you can do something, even if it could get you arrested.