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

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

“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.”

“I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.”

“My mother taught me to knit when I was seven. I forgot about knitting until one day I saw Marion at the counter with hers and confessed that I knew how. Confessed is the right word. In those days, in the early 1980s, knitting was not a hobby a preteen would readily admit to. But Marion, every enthusiastic, pounced upon me and insisted that I show her something I'd made. I did -- a misshapen scarf -- which she priased exravagantly. she lent me a raspberry-colored wool for another project, a hat for myself. Since then I've been knitting pretty continuously. It's addictive and it's soothing, and fora a few minutes anyway, it makes me feel closer to my mother.”

“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.”