“Lou asked point-blank, Can love last? (Rural people get to philosophizing, and will say anything.)Oh, darling! No, not that heart-thumping passion. Give that eighteen months. But its replaced by so...”

“If she[] had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take - and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery ...”

“Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you.”

“Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame bed all smiles and laughter. When they were intimate to the last degree on that bed, did Lou's exp...”

“Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night,...”

“The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and ...”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.”

“Oh, Sweetie. No one ever gets through their TBR list. For every book you finish, you'll add five more. That's just the way it works.”

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”