“To say the loaner was not pretty was an understatement. It was a 1907's olive-green Buick Century with a white top. Lindsay felt like she was driving her living-room couch, but despite the looks, the engine purred and it glided over potholes in the road like butteron toast.”

“Potholes and bumps? Welcome to the world. Every road gas them. They're there to be navigated, avoided, driven over, or through to the other side. Don't keep driving into the pothole.”

“But my pretty little Gwen…me and her daddy…” Then she purred. Seriously. Purred.”

“Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.”

“She didn’t understand love, not the golden, shimmering, romance-novel stuff that existed between mates. She was skeptical of it, and had never been one to pretend that it existed just for the sake of excitement. She didn’t know what it looked like, what it felt like…at least, she hadn’t. But she realized, amid the dancing tendrils of ivy that climbed the gazebo, that love – that good, golden kind she’d always discounted – didn’t arrive with a blast of trumpets and an earth-shattering epiphany. It was earned, formed, created, day by day, a little at a time. And it looked like Mike eating toast over her kitchen sink, felt like his hand smoothing her hair back off her face, sounded like his sudden shout of laughter when she spilled a whole sack of flour out of the top cabinet down onto her head in his kitchen, tasted like the kiss he used to make up for it.”

“Don't tell a woman she's pretty; tell her there's no other woman like her, and all roads will open to you”