“Because trying to think of how to ask a woman you’ve known for exactly two days if she’d be willing to get into a car with you and take a road trip across the country was something I hadn’t quite worked up to yet.”

“When you fly across the country in an airplane the country seems vast; but it isn't vast. It's all connected by roads one can ride a bike down. If you watch the news and there's a tragedy at a house in Kansas, that guy's driveway connects with yours, and you'd be surprised by how few roads it takes to get there.”

“Sorry, I thought I saw a guilt trip looming up,’ said Clements. ‘I had a Catholic upbringing - spent a week in a monastery once. My mother – a devout woman all her days, God bless her – thought it would do me good to be exposed to truly good people who had denied themselves everything to follow God.’ Clements snorted and turned to look out of the car window.‘I take it, it didn’t work?’‘I don’t think there was a single one of them – apart from maybe a little Irishman, who had never known anything else - who wasn’t on some kind of guilt trip. They hadn’t given up anything at all: they were running away from things; hiding; the lot of them; and mainly from their real selves. Show me a monk and I’ll show you one screwed-up individual with a past.”

“Soon enough it will be me struggling (valiantly?) to walk - lugging my stuff around. How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say O.K. Why do I feel so sorry for everyone and so proud?”

“How do you know you're in love?" I asked her. "Because if it's determined by how willing you are to give up everything for the other person, I think it's a flawed system.”

“You know what I’ve been thinking?”Why I hadn’t crawled over the center console and into his lap yet? Because damn if I was wondering that very thing, but the car was way too small for those kind of Shenanigans.”