“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times -- always with the same person.”

“Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding...”

“There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.”

“An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.”

“What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.”

“Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway.”

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed.”

“Sky, wait. The way his voice wraps around my name makes me wish the only word in his entire vocabulary way Sky.”

“I'm not going to do it again," Lena Marquez whispered to the red purse across the hall from her nestle of blankets. "Never again.”

“Love isn't something you find. Love is something that finds you.”

“True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.”

“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”

“People don't always need a name.”

“I stole the very shiniest words and hoarded them all up until they made something worth having.”

“Sometimes a name seems our most arbitrary possession,and sometimes it seems like the grain in a rocklike a sculptor's hunk of Italian marble: Whack itand you might get either your first glimpse of ...”