“Dreams shape the kind of human beings we become. Not having a dream gave me a smaller future and made me a smaller person.”

“It took vulnerability to forge strength, the way true courage required fear.”

“Barrie wanted to fall into him, her lost to his found, her need to his want. Kissing was like the physical form of magic, all potential and the sense that anything might happen. When she was kissin...”

“It occurred to her that all the bad parts of life, the sad parts, the frightening ones, were meant to be offset by moments and memories like this. She had to be present in it, right here, right now.”

“So many of the things she had found lately hadn't been precisely lost. But she wasn't found without them.”

“Those whom we most love are often the most alien to us.”

“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”

“Ivan tells Anna: "I used to imagine that being embraced by a woman . . . as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everthing . . . [But] happiness, it turns out, will be to share with ...”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”

“Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision”

“The worst thing is to have all that clout and not know your own mind. If she says her (Marilyn Monroe's)favorite color is beige, that has to be a definite possibility. Then she will be as dangerous...”