"So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream."

"Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound."

"But it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?"

"The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been."

"See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it."

"She didn't like it when religious folks looked down on her for being an atheist; but to be honest, I didn't see how this was any different from the way she looked down on people for being Christians."

"When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point taht wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along."

"Someone real," I hear myself saying. "Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like I've known my whole life, even if I haven't."

"No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged."

"I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?"

"A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up."

"The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it's a damn good start."

"I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces."

"His grandmother had taught him that there was no such thing as coincidence. There are millions of people in this world, she had told him, and the spirits will see that most of them, you never have to meet. But there are one or two that you are tied to, and spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right."

"You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them."

"When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth."

"The Lord turned water into wine. All I'm suggesting is a trip to the grocery store."

"What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars."

"It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon."

"Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas--a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak."

"True confession: The reason we don't talk about race is because we do not speak a common language."

"I don't think we get a choice in who we fall for," Ian whispers. "I think we just do."

"The best place to cry is on a mother's arms."

"I sigh. "But if you'd talked to Jules-if she could hear you . . . My voice trails off."Then you wouldn't feel quite so crazy? Oliver asks gently. "Can't you believe in me, if I believe in you?"

"If there isn't a them, there can't be an us."

"If you're afraid of everyone leaving you, what do you do?"Make them stay."And if you can't do that, or don't know how to?"Ellie shrugged. "I don't know."Yes, you do. In fact, you've done it. You leave first," Coop said, "so you don't have to watch them walk away."

"History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination."

"Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?"

"It turned out people truly did cry into their coffee cups."

"Every life has a sound."

"Objection!" Metz shouts.Grounds?" the judge asks.Well...he's my witness!"

"Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he'd promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again."

"And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through."

"You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride."

"I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be."

"You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them."

"A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when it's ready."

"My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse."

"When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn't."

"I've got a Don Baylor," J.T. said."California sucks this year."Ralph snickered. "I wouldn't use a Baylor card to scrape dog shit off the street."

"If i'm going to fuck up my life, does it really matter which way i do it?."

"Maybe I was naA ve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything."

"I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same."

"I drew it over my skin like a violins bow, No one would ever hear the song of my shame."

"The only difference between a wish and a prayer is that you're at the mercy of the universe for the first, and you've got some help with the second."

"When I'm with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that's backing up."

"It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for."

"It was a strange thing, to still be in love with your wife and to not know if you liked her. What would happen when this was all over? Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help?I had filed for divorce, but that wasn't what I really wanted. What I really wanted was for all of us to go back two years, and start over. Had I ever really told her that?"

"See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded."

"They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don't realize I am one of them."