"When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a tod."

"I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer."

"Raw love, like raw heart-ache, could blindside you."

"I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet."

"Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board."

"Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength - and the honesty - to break them down."

"I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there."

"The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it ... some stories just don't have a happy ending."

"On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger's. Like me, they're very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone."

"There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's too late."

"How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?"

"I love the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying-like the sun striking th cheek of a tomato, or soap drying in the hood of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine. I loved."

"Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves."

"Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers."

"If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?"

"My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her."

"People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes."

"What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?"

"It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else's. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party - a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly."

"Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut."

"He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips."

"There are skeletons in everyone's closet, things no one ever wants the world to discover."

"The feeling that she was going to explode, that she was too big for her own skin."

"If I tell you another seven hundred times, maybe one of these days you might turn your clothes right side out when you put them in the hamper, eh?"

"Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids... but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life."

"McAfee, I could try this case in my sleep and still win.""Guess that's your plan, then, since you're clearly dreaming."

"Edward: You know what the difference is between a dream and a goal? he used to say to me. A plan."

"DO you think it hurts to die?" Not as much as it hurts to live, Trixie thought."

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"

"It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn't."

"It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?"

"I knew that somewhere God was laughing. He had taken the other half of my heart, the one person who knew me better than I knew myself, and He had done what nothing else could do. By bringing us together, He had set into motion the one thing that could tear us apart."

"The hardest part about being back in the human world was relearning emotion. Everything a wolf does has a practical, simple reason. There is no cold shoulder, no saying one thing when you mean something else, no innuendo. Wolves fight for two reasons: family and territory. Humans are driven by ego; wolves have no room for it and will literally nip it out of you. For a wolf, the world is about understanding, knowledge, respect " attributes that many humans have cast off, along with an appreciation of the natural world."

"Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence."

"The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do."

"Raw love, like raw heartache, could blindside you."

"A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead."

"The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come."

"The only thing they'll let you shoot with a camera."

"When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else."

"The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law."

"Logically, I understand that it wasn't Edward's fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you're eleven years old, you don't give a flip about logic. You just really miss holding your big brother's hand."

"Polar north can't get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what."

"It was the first time she'd discovered something she really didn't want to find, and she didn't know what to do once she'd found it."

"You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed."

"There is a magic to intimacy, a world built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger than iron. There is only you, and him, so impossibly close that nothing can come between. Not the enemy, not your allies. In this safe haven, in this hallowed place and time, I could even ask the questions whose answers I feared."

"Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life."

"Cara: I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn't mean you're fearless. It just means you fear different things."

"Houses are cellular walls, they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's."

"Can you fall for someone because you're lazy?"