“Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because t...”

“As corny as it sounds, Gallagher said, life is very long. You're supposed to mess up when you're young and other people sometimes benefit from your mistakes-as you did in this case. But things rare...”

“You couldn't teach kindness, she thought. It was something you were born with. People either had it or they didn't.”

“Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didnt want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didnt feel so good today.”

“I've never minded it," he went on. "Being lost, that is. I had always thought one could not truly be lost if one knew one's own heart. But I fear I may be lost without knowing yours.”

“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison”