“I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.”

“Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.”

“I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.”

“Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.”

“That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.”

“And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.”

“To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.”