“Everyone should be lucky enough to be loved for a long time. To know what that was like--to be loved and to change, to be privileged to suffer it, to remain. To know, as she did, that there was only one person she could ever love. To know it incontrovertibly. To accept it, with all the attendant limits. Once you did, it was the closest thing there was to safety.”

“You know, as I've grown older, my ideas about sin have changed. I used to believe that sins were things you did, but I don't think that now. I think sins are what you ignore.”

“A man who loves his mother too much is someone who can never love his wife enough.”

“Worse, he seemed as impassive as some of the killers he'd interrogated. That more than anything was what struck him. Men who killed serially suffered a unique lack of affect. You felt this in advance, a physical pressure before they entered a room. There was something impenetrable and thick behind their eyes, a gaze that was shark-dumb. They were people, Hastroll thought, who could not be touched by love.”

“Perhaps it's simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.”

“Of all the thoughts we think, it's only those that actually manifest themselves that seem significant. But the thoughts just before the event are like the fortune in the cookie. The fortune's as random as the thought." - Nathan Harold”

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you ask someone to marry you and the person pukes, that's a sign.”