"But remember that you might do all the things I suggest, and she will still turn out to be different from what you hoped, because sometimes life just does its thing. What matters is that you try. And always trust your instincts above all else, because you will be guided by your love for your child."

"You know it was love at first sight for both of us," he said."

"I don't want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life," Curt said with a force that startled her."

"There were emotions she wanted to hold in the palm of her hand that were simply no longer there."

"He thought about the next time he would laugh with her and then the next. He found himself often thinking about the future, even before the present was over."

"Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?"

"There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man was ugly."

"Soon," he said in his letter. They said "soon" to each other often, and "soon" gave their plan the weight of something real."

"And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it."

"There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach."