“If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, 'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?”

“There's nothing you could have done that would cause me to cease loving either of you. Will is myself, my own soul, and if I am not to have the keeping of your heart, then there is not other I would rather have that honor.”

“I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.”

“I counted seventy-three shades of grey in an eight-by-ten room.”

“I remember my first cell phone number still. I may call it and ask to speak to myself from eight years ago. If they say I have the wrong number I’ll tell them, No, right number, wrong time.”

“There are two truths," said Katie finally. "As a mother, I say it would have been a terrible thing for a girl to sleep with a stranger--a man she had known less than forty-eight hours. Horrible things might have happened to you. Your whole life might have been ruined. As your mother, I tell you the truth. "But as a woman..." she hesitated. "I will tell you the truth as a woman. It would have been a very beautiful thing. Because there is only once that you love that way.”