“Her love for him is not something that can be changed— it’s physics, not emotion: It’s the exact weight of radium. It is vast and it is exact. It is tender and finite and inexhaustible. Her love for him is a fact. Her love for him is a brutal fact about the world.”

“Whether he loved her or not didn't change how she felt about him. She loved him independent and regardless of whether he loved her.”

“It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.”

“I know a man who is in love with my friend. He loves her absolutely. The only thing he wants in return is for her to love him.” Saiman arched his eyebrows, imitating me. “And?” "You’re the exact opposite of him. You lack the capacity to love, so you want to smother mine as well.”

“When we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong with the fearful, the true mixed in with the façade, and of course, the only way we can do it is by accepting ourselves that way.”

“To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”