"Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you'd let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I've been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back."

"There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?"

"True love is felonious. You take someone's breath away. You rob them of the ability to utter a single word. You steal a heart."

"You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future."

"The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we're supposed to."

"I don't know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You'd be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused."

"That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes.I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt."

"Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river."

"Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far."

"Here's a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to."

"Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time."

"No matter what Joe Hoffman and Wade Preston say, it's not gender that makes a family; it's love. You don't need a mother and a father; you don't necessarily even need two parents. You just need someone who's got your back."

"All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here."

"It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened."

"That's the life, she said to me, as we watched a puppy chase its own tail. That's what I want to be next.I had laughed. you would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don't need anyone else.I need you, she replied.Well, I said. Maybe I'll come back as catnip."

"Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall."

"Stupid English.""English isn't stupid," I say."Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me.""Why not?""He says lunch isn't a subject."I glance at him. "It isn't.""Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?"

"Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?"

"When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web."

"You know how I get angry sometimes? That's because it's the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I'm really here."

"We all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn't have any."

"Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max's hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It's a note I have never heard - this chord of pure pain - and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me."

"Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed."

"If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?"

"When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right."

"They go on to this better place, you know, which is what they wanted all along. But you and me, we're still left behind with all the questions they couldn't answer."

"Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect."

"Being a mother gives you a singular sort of vision, a prism through which you can see your child with many different faces all at once. It is the reason you can watch him shatter a ceramic lamp, and still remember him as an angel."

"Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth."

"It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye."

"If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them."

"In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past."

"Here's what I hadn't realized: the mother you haven't seen for almost thirty-six years isn't your mother, she's a stranger. Sharing DNA doesn't make you fast friends. This wasn't a joyous reunion. It was just awkward."

"Where you come from does matter -- but not nearly as much as where you are headed."

"Isn't that what true romance is supposed to be about? Finding the person who's your soul mate. Someone you dream about at night.Someone whose name is on your lips when you wake up in the morning."

"History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them."

"Choices are funny things-ask a native tribe that's eaten grubs and roots forever if they're unhappy, and they'll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don't know there's an alternative, you can't miss it."

"But no one ever said yes to make sex consensual. You took hints from body language, from the way two people came together. Why...didn't a shake of the head or a hand pushing hard against a chest speak just as loudly? Why did you have to actually say the word no for it to be rape?"

"Sara," I ask finally, "what do you want from me?""I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like," she says thickly. "I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back."But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her."

"You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?"

"Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally--break them apart?"

"We take the elevator to the third floor, to the office of Dr. Harrison Chance. His name alone has put me off. Why not Dr. Victor?"

"When you love someone you let them take care of you."

"Once, I asked my mom why stars shine. She said they werenight-lights, so the angels could find their way around in Heaven.But when I asked my dad, he started talking about gas, and somehowI put it all together and figured that the food God served causedmultiple trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night."

"Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception."

"Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him."

"I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not."

"This is love, I think. A place where people who have been alone may lock together like hawks and spin in the air, dizzy with surprise at the connection. A place you go willingly, and with wonder."

"Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways."

"There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met."