Peter Swanson

She was beautiful—long red hair, eyes a lucid greenish blue like tropical waters, and skin so pale it was the almost bluish white of skim milk. If a woman like that sits down next to you at your neighborhood bar and compliments your drink order, you think your life is about to change.

Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.”

Someone is dead.
Even the trees know it.
—Anne Sexton, “Lament”

“teachers are the worst at conferences, like poorly behaved children. They do things they’d never let their own students do.

isn’t falling in love with someone else a risk for everyone in a marriage

our memories are never reliable, that what we are actually remembering is not the event itself, but a replay of the last time we remembered the event

What the books taught him was that there was a whole world out there, an adult world, of sex and death and betrayal and lies.

Wives were gatekeepers, really, telling the world that the man they had married had been thoroughly vetted and passed some sort of test.

Then he discovered the subset of girls who’d been ignored their whole lives, the wallflowers, and he found that they were far more interesting to him. He could talk them into the only kind of sex he enjoyed, sex that hurt, and he found that sometimes he could even talk them into hurting other people with him.