“I have a sort of . . . thing, I suppose, for certain words. They spark inside me, somehow, turning me to touchpaper, but I don't know what they are until someone says them.”

“I knew how to be a friend, a lover, a partner. I knew how to make someone feel cherished and seen and listened to -- everything I had myself always so desperately wanted and been afraid I might nev...”

“I never interrupt people when they're speaking because I know only too well how annoying it is. But with my every brattish interjection, the dimples deepened at the corner of his lips. And I was ha...”

“I thought of Marius. Wild, wonderful, Byronic-fantasy Marius, who had somehow found something he wanted in the everyday quietness of me. Until he hadn't.”

“Life is so full of rough edges - small tasks and expectations that scratch you bloody and remind you that you're naked and alone.”

“In daylight and up close, he was merciless, all smiles and freckles, the brightest, boldest flame a moth could wish for.”

“Worry is like a rocking-chair. It gives you something to do buy gets you nowhere.”

“But if that was going to happen, it was going to happen whether or not he worried about it.”

“Perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.”