“You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor.""I don't want to survive it.""I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice...”

“I want to know how it feels to be altered by life”

“Sometimes, Edie, a person's feelings aren't rational. At least, they don't seem that way on the surface. You have to dig a little deeper to understand what lies at the base”

“Was that what Nell had done, too? Forsaken the life and the family she'd been given, to focus instead on the one she'd been without.”

“True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.”

“For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.”

“While I wasn't certain how I felt about spiritualists, I was certain enough about the type of people who were drawn to them. Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.”