Figure out how to balance Oliver with a career you’ve wanted your whole life,” he tells me. “Because you’ll end up with neither if you think you have to choose.

His arms became a set of parentheses bracketing the sweetest secret phrase.

I can't read him. I can't grasp him. I have no idea what he's thinking and if he's messing with me or if he really is this good, but never before have I wanted so fiercely to learn forward and put my mouth on someone's neck, begging them to want me.

Relationships are a lot like houses: without a good foundation, they’ll crumble. When a light bulb goes out, you don’t buy a new house, you change the bulb. When the faucet drips, you don’t start mopping the floor before you fix the leak. In other words, no matter how much digging it takes, it’s important to get to the root of a problem.

To get the best woman in the world,” I whispered, “I had to start with the basics: Love her as she is, not as you want her to be. Become the person she can’t live without. Be her right-hand man. Learn what she needs, and she won’t give you up, not for anything in the world.” I had become the person she couldn’t live without. I had become her right-hand man . . . and the father of her child. And it just so happened, every single day, I was the luckiest bastard alive.

I can't wait for that one girl to come in and kick your feet from under you. You think you have things organized, sorted. [...] When that one girl comes along, I'm going to say I told you so, and give you no bloody sympathy when you've turned into a lovesick strop.

I forgot how it feels, how insanely different it is to make love, not just hook up of get off. It isn't two bodies coming into contact for pleasure alone. It's the weird sense of getting inside that person, turning sex into a fucking revelation.

Pippa was different. She was an electric charge, a flash of light. Falling in love with Pippa and watching her walk away would be like watching someone extinguish the sun.

The way Emily describes it: when I meet someone I love, I become an octopus and wind my tentacles around their heart, tighter and tighter until they can't deny they love me just the same.