- Catherine: I've carried a romantic idea of people all my life, perhaps too romantic. That has changed quite a bit recently. I saw a great love as a kind of perfect love. Maybe it's not. Maybe a great love--like a great country, or a great leader, even--is a flawed one. Maybe what makes it great is its embrace of our failures, our scars, our f-ed-up-edness. As long as we are questing always for better, knowing that we will bring ourselves down as often as we set ourselves free. Maybe a great marriage is simply the ability to hold all that in one tender, yearning heart.
- Peter: It turns out the worst thing in life is to come up against your own limitations and stumble, and then in the fall you crush the one person you wish to be your best for.
- Catherine: [about Peter killing her mother] It doesn't matter why he did it. Or how.
- Aunt Elizabeth: Of course it does! That is where the human being lives - in the how and why, not the should. If you cannot metabolize your pure ideas of love and philosophy with blood and sinew and fucked-up humans who do their best and fail but try to love and serve you...
- Catherine: Everything in me wants to fucking kill him.
- Aunt Elizabeth: Not everything. Or you wouldn't have to hit yourself in the face.