“That was one helpful thing he said to her, the first thing that caught her attention. "Start your life." Because she had assumed that her life was over.”

“A girl never forgets two things: the day she started her period for the first time, and the day she met the love of her life.”

“All her life she'd listened to talk, life was full of talk. People said things, true and interesting things and ridiculous things. Her father used to say they talked too much. There was much to say, she had said her share. How else was one to know a thing except by naming it? But words now fell so far from where life was. Words fell on a distant shore. It turned out there were other tracks on which life registered where things weren't acknowledged with words or given attention to or commented on.”

“Saving her life was the one acceptable thing I'd done since I met her. The one thing that I was not ashamed of. The one and only thing that made me glad I existed at all. I'd been fighting to keep her alive since the first moment I'd caught her scent.”

“..he said, he didn't know what to do. He couldn't move forward. He thought, they should move on. He started crying. Not for himdelf, for her. He'd rescued her from her lousy life, and now he was throwing her back. He felt like a shit for doing it, for things having to be that way, for not being able to gove her what she wanted. The last thing he wanted was to hurt her. The only part that wasn't in the manual, was her response: She started to laugh. "Oh, give me a break," she said.”

“At that moment a very good thing was happening to her. Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone.”