“Now she saw that marriage was like being in a three-legged race with the same person for the rest of your life. Your hopes, your happiness, your luck, your moods, all yoked to his.”

“The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.”

“Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.”

“It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.”

“One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.”

“So many believe that it is love that grows, but it is the knowing that grows and love simply expands to contain it.”

“I loved him.I couldn't pinpoint what made me so certain, but I knew it then, as surely as I knew my name or the color of the sky or any fact written in a book.Could he feel it, too?Maxon broke the ...”

“The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done.”

“I feel like every project I work on is a dream project, so long as I am learning.”

“Love, too, has to be learned.”

“Every pain is a lesson.”

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”

“Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away a...”

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of makin...”