MARRIAGE

'As she straightened the stacks of stationary in her desk (because there was nothing else to do), a familiar little panic gripped her: she couldn't marry him - she hardly knew him. Sometimes it occurred to her differently, that she couldn't marry him because she knew him too well, and either way it left her badly shaken, vulnerable to all the things Martha, her roommate, had said right from the beginning.'  

Richard Yates, 'The Best of Everything' in Collected Stories, p.20. 

TIME

'Our ability to measure and appportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.'

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, p.213.

MARRIAGE

'Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on.'

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, p.27.