“At the end of the day, he said, "I will take care of you," his voice thick with emotion. She stood before him and nodded. He zipped her coat for her.”

“He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.”

“She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.”

“He looked at the books, and she wanted to say, 'Stop that,' as though he were reading her diary.”

“He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing though each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.”

“And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child - that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else's home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one's own.”

“She could hear in the darkness of her car how his breathing was quicker now; and her own was, too. She wanted to say their hears were too old for this now; you can't keep doing this to a heart, can't keep expecting your heart to pull through.”