“Ross believed in past lives. Moreover, he believed that the person you fell in love with in each life was the same person you fell in love with in the life before, and the one before that. Sometimes, you might miss her - she'd be reborn in post-World War I generation, and you wouldn't come back until the fifties. Sometimes, your paths would cross and you wouldn't recognize each other. Get it right - that is: fall madly, truly, deeply - and perhaps there'd be an eternity carved out solely for the two of you.”

“And when your wife is not the same person you fell in love with eight years ago, where exactly does that leave you? Do you try to get to know who she has become, and hope for the best? Or do you keep deceiving yourself in the hope that she might wake up one morning and have gone back to the woman she used to be? May be, Caleb thinks with a small shock, he isn't the same person he once was, either.”

“Just because you choose to leave a place did not mean that you could escape taking it with you. A man and a woman who lived together long enough might swap traits, until they found parts of themselves in each other. Jettison a personality and you just might find it taking up residence in the heart of the person you loved most.”

“Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.”

“And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall”

“The problem with marriage - or may be its strength - was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being. If you were lucky, you could still recognize each other years later.”

“I believe that you can fall in love many times with many different people. However, I don't think that you can fall in love the same way twice. One type of relationship may be steady. Another may be fire and brimstone. Who is to say if one of these is better that the other? The deciding factor is how it all fits together. Your love, I mean, and your life.”