"And when I came in with tears in my eyes, you always knew whether I needed you to hold me or just let me be. I don't know how you knew, but you did, and you made it easier for me."

"It all comes down to who's by your side."

"My daddy saidthat the first time you fall in love, it changes you forever and no matter how hard you try, the feeling just never goes away."

"Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can."

"This is not a goodbye, my darling, this is a thank you. Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go.I love you, T."

"She wondered when her daughter would realise that for the most part, people weren't that different. Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: The wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life without turmoil, they wanted to be happy. The difference, she thought, was that most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future. While most older people believed that they lay in the past."

"He often felt that too many people lived their lives acting and pretending,wearing masks and losing themselves in the process."

"...nothing wonderful lasted forever. Joy was as fleeting as a shooting star that crossed the evening sky, ready to blink out at any moment."

"Distance can ruin even the best of intentions.But I suppose it depends on how you look at it.Distance just adds a richness you would not otherwise get.People come. People go. They will drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book.When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their stories and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones. Not the ones from the past."

"And suddenly she knew exactly why Catherine had fallen in love with him. It wasn't that he was unusually attractive, or ambitious, or even charming. He was partly those things, but more important, he seemed to live life on his own terms."

"Knowing there's one thing I still haven't told you: I now believe, by the way, that miracles can happen."

"We're not the same people we were then. We've changed, we've grown."

"Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it."

"They inspire you, they entertain you, and you end up learning a ton even when you don't know it."

"For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget."

"I don't hate it here," she said automatically. Surprising herself, she realized that as much as she'd been trying to convince herself otherwise, she was telling the truth. "It's just that I don't belong here."He gave her a meloncholy smile. "If it's any consolation, when I was growing up, I didn't feel like I belonged here, either. I dreamed about going to New York. But it's strange, because when I finally escaped this place, I ended up missing it more than I thought I would. There's something about the ocean that just calls to me."

"Our lives can't be measured by our final years, of this I am sure."

"We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox."

"Jamie: You know what I figured out today?Landon: What?Jamie: Maybe God has a bigger plan for me than I had for myself. Like this journey never ends. Like you were sent to me because I'm sick. To help me through all this. You're my angel."

"Allie noticed it all, every sound, every thought. Her senses had come alive, invigorating her, and she felt her mind drifting through the last few weeks."

"And though she didn't know it then, whenever her thoughts drifted back toward the past, she would always remember that this was how it all began."

"I'll admit that it's not easy to get an agent, but becoming successful in anything requires perseverance."

"I'll be with my sister. And believe it or not, she has a phone and everything. She stopped using smoke signals last year." - Nana."

"The scariest thing about distance is that you don't know whether they'll miss you or forget you."

"For desert, maybe we can split a couple of crumbs."

"I'm stuck babysitting turtle eggs while a volleyball player slash grease monkey slash aquarium volunteer tries to hit on me. I'm not hitting on you, he protested.No?Believe me, you'd know if I was hitting on you. You wouldn't be able to stop yourself from succumbing to my charms."

"I'll think about you every day. Part of me is scared that there will come a time when you don't feel the same way,that you'll somehow forget what we shared, so this is what I want to do. Wherever you are and no matter what's going on in your life, when it's the first night of the full moon-like it was the first time we met-I want you to find it in the nighttime sky. I want you to think about me and the week we shared, because wherever I am and no matter what's going on in my life, that's exactly what I'll be doing. If we can't be together, at least we can share that, and maybe between the two of us, we can make it last forever."

"I guess what I'm trying to say is that you are there, in everything I am, in everything I've ever done, and looking back, I know that I should have told you know much you've always meant to me."

"I'd learned that some things are best kept secret."

"Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She'd believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn't foresee or even understand, leaving a long trail of regret in its wake. And almost always, those regrets led to the kinds of what if questions that could never be answered."

"Yes, I decided, a man can truly change. The events of the past year have taught me much about myself, and a few universal truths. I learned, for instance, that while wounds can be inflicted easily upon those we love, it's often much more difficult to heal them. Yet the process of healing those wounds provided the richest experience of my life, leading me to believe that while I've often overestimated what I could accomplish in a day, I had underestimated what I could do in a year. But most of all, I learned that it's possible for two people to fall in love all over again, even when there's been a lifetime of disappointment between them."

"Theresa, I know there's a part of you that believes you can change someone, but the reality is that you can't. You can change yourself, and Garrett can change himself, but you can't do it for him."

"Staring at the stars was like staring backward in time, since some stars are so far away that their light takes millions of years just to reach us. That we see stars not as they look now, but as they were when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole concept just struck me as amazing somehow."

"There are guys who grow up thinking they'll settle down some distant time in the future, and there are guys who are ready for marriage as soon as they meet the right person. The former bore me, mainly because they're pathetic; and the latter, quite frankly, are hard to find. But it's the serious ones I'm interested in, and it takes time to find a guy like that whom I'm equally interested in. I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?"

"The day my life changed forever...The day I first saw you."

"I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?"

"I love you now for what we've already shared, and I love you now in anticipation of all that's to come."

"Every couple needs to argue now and then. Just to prove that the relationship is strong enough to survive. Long-term relationships, the ones that matter, are all about weathering the peaks and the valleys."

"He was a solitary figure in a vast landscape while she was a face in a nameless crowd."

"People come, people go " they'll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past."

"As they spoke, the only thing I could think about was that scene from Julius Caesar where Brutus stabs him in the back. Et tu, Eric?"

"But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing."

"And all I could think was that I would like to spend every morning for the rest of my life waking up beside her."

"All of sudden, this shooting star went by, and all I could think was that they were listening to us somehow."

"It doesn't sound so far-fetched, right? When two people love each other? While a part of me still wants to believe it's possible, I know it's not going to happen."

"Science only goes so far, then comes God."

"You might not understand, but I gave you the best of me, and after you left, nothing was ever the same."

"Rekindled love is generally short-term."

"We are not perfect. We make mistakes. We screw up but then we forgive and move forward."

"The key to happiness was achievable dreams."