“Because as far as she was concerned, there was no in-between: She wanted all or nothing, illogically, irrationally, even though something inside her knew that nothing would be too hard, and all was impossible.”

“Hadley realises that even though everything else is different, even though there's still an ocean between them, nothing really important has changed at all.He's still her dad. The rest is just geography.”

“She understands now what she, in all her worry, had forgotten. That even as she hesitates and wavers, even as she thinks too much and moves too cautiously, she doesn't always have to get it right. It's okay to look back, even as you move forward.”

“Emma knew that she'd always been on the wrong side of the line that separated her from her parents, from Patrick and Annie and Nate, even from Peter. But how could she tell him that the reason she always acted so disinterested in everything was because of the worry that she herself wasn't all that interesting?”

“But Hadley understood. It wasn't that she was meant to read them all. Maybe someday she would, but for now, it was more the gesture itself. He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how. He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.”

“Because the truth is that now that he’s here, she can’t imagine it any other way. Now that he’s here, she worries that crossing an entire ocean with someone between them might be something like torture.”

“But how could she tell him that the reason she always acted so disinterested in everything was because of the worry that she herself wasn't all that interesting?”