“The person who wants out of the relationship always gets her way.”

“But certainly not everyday you can find someone who wants to have a monogamous relationship”

“In short, I have no real faith in my own happiness. And then there is Darcy. She is a woman who believes that things should fall into her lap, and consequently, they do. They always have. She wins because ehse expects to win. I do not expect to get what I want, so I don't. And I don't even try.”

“It was about grace, she decides, something that has been missing from her own life. ... She wants to be the kind of person who can bestow unearned kindness on another, replace bitterness with empathy, forgive only for the sake of forgiving.”

“I was aware that we were both silently making those inevitable comparisons, putting our relationship in context. She is more this and less that. He is better or worse in these ways. It is human nature to do this--unless its your first relationship, which might be the very reason that your first relationship feels special and remains forever sacred. But the older you get, the more cynical you become, and the more complicated and convoluted the exercise is. You begin to realize that nothing is perfect, that there are trade-offs and sacrifices. The worst is when someone in your past trumps the person in the present, and you think to yourself: if I'd known this, then maybe I wouldn't have let him go.”

“It always takes two. For relationships to work, for them to break apart, for them to be fixed.”

“And then there is Darcy. She is a woman who believes that things should fall into her lap, and, consequently, they do. They always have. She wins because she expects to win. I do not expect what I want, so I dont. And I dont even try.”