“For a split second they stared at each other. A fleeting, lasting moment. One person noticing another person out of a whole crowd of strangers.”

“Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body's life.”

“I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.”

“I'll trade you then, an exchange of a deeply personal experience... From one stranger to another.”

“Love between strangers takes only a few seconds and can last a whole life.”

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”