“Nick was chocolate and cigarettes and whiskey and danger, and everything I should stay away from.”

“He has never known a woman so free from conceit, vanity, ambition, pretense. He has never known a woman so willing to show the world that she is a human being.”

“I will hold your hand and we will walk across this world, and I will sing to you and our babies, and that will be enough for me.”

“...of the things I want my daughters to know the greatest of these is love.”

“To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, to be late is to be forgotten.”

“All her life, Claire had had a problem figuring out where other people ended and she began. All her life, she’d taken on the world’s hurt; she held herself responsible. But why?”

“If everyone slept with the person he or she had secretly fallen in love with, the world would be chaos.”