“She looked long and lean and beautiful, and she was totally unaware of her looks as she called him. She had lived in a world of extraordinary-looking people for so long, and hers was a life of the mind rather than the beauty of face and body. She never thought about it, which somehow made her even more attractive.”

“Love meant something to her, she dreamt of it, thought of it, wrote of it. It was the one thing in life that had eluded her completely.”

“She wasn't on heroin then, but she was a mess. I thought I was going to put Humpty Dumpty back together and turn her into a princess. Instead, she turned into scrambled eggs, and always was”

“People are so obsessed with that these days. As long as you're healthy, what difference do a few pounds make? Crazy diets. Thirteen-year-old girls on magazine covers who wind up in hospitals because they're so anorexic. Real women don't look like that. And who wants them to? No one wants a woman who looks sick or like she;s been from a refugee camp.”

“And the worst thing she had heard were the words he hadn't said, the fact that he hadn't loved her.”

“On a June day, a young woman in a summer dress steps off a Chicago-bound bus into a small midwestern town. She doesn't intend to stay. She is just passing through. Yet her stopping here has a reason and it is part of a story that you will never forget.”

“But even she had figured out that there was no point giving up a great job and following him to the ends of the earth, when he simply refused to make any promises about, or even discuss, the future.”