“Terrible beautiful combination of happiness and pain.”

“He is a man, and he is afraid. This is not a good combination.”

“Before this trip and all that she'd learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it.”

“...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed.Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.”

“Jude remembered this pain. Every woman had felt some version of it: the end of first love. It was when you learned, for good and always, that love could be impermanent.”

“She still felt shell-shocked by all of it, numb. Beneath the numbness, though, was a raw and terrible anger that was unlike anything she'd felt before. She had so little experience with genuine anger that it scared her. She actually worried that if she started screaming, she'd never stop.”

“That was her mistake. She'd pinned her happiness to a teenage girl's chest. Idiot. The realization made her almost smile. She certainly knew better than that.”