“You choose the end of the summer to fall in love with this guybecause secretly, you don’t want it to last.”

“You can't make yourself fall in love, just as you can't choose who you fall in love with.”

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.That is their mystery and their magic.”

“The end of all things--a book, a life, a summer, a marriage, the last bite of cake, the last of innocence lost, a love affair--is always sad, at least a little bit sad, because it is the end, the end of that.”

“You can love someone as many ways as water falls from the sky. Sometimes it falls with thunder and lightning; other times it falls silently. Sometimes it falls as cool snow, and other times hard balls of ice beat down. If you want the water, you don't get to choose how it falls.”

“You know, my Katie, if I could be someone who could take care of you, fall in love with you, make you fall in love with me, you know I’d do it. It would keep us together. I don’t want to lose you. But I can’t seem to fall in love with anyone who is good for me.”