“The falling apart of a man's life should make more noise. It should startle passesrby with its Sturm and Drang. It ought to sound like the Parthenon crashing down. Not this ordinary, everyday kind of quiet...He closed his eyes...And still it was quiet, this falling apart of his life, as silent as the last beat of an old man's heart. A quiet, echoing thud, and then...nothing.”

“The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life.....Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are.”

“For years he'd strived to make a difference in the world, and he'd worked like a dog to make that happen, and yet here he was, a man sitting on a dock with his children, and never had he felt more certain that his words mattered.”

“He was afraid that the secrets she'd kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would--for one heartbeat--flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.”

“He wanted to be angry, to scream and rail and feel honest-to-God outrage. But he wasn't that kind of man. His love for Mikaela was more than just an emotion; it was the sum total of who he was. This one thing he knew above everything else. He loved Mikaela too much. Which in its way was as bad as loving someone not enough.”

“Lulu twirled in front of Jolene, banging into the seat. her eyes sparkled in that I'm-either-going-to-scream-or-fall-asleep-any-second kind of way.”

“Of course you can fall in love. You just have to let yourself. They don't call it falling for nothing. -Kate”