“...maybe just once in this life someone loves us for the us we don't even know how to be yet. And if we lose him too early--in the name of all the promises in the world: a new job, a new city, an old love offering us happily ever after--we may just lose that chance to be our best self.”

“Where do we go from here? I started off this crazy weekend by trying to make sense of these moments—these moments that you know you’re going to remember—but like anything else, nothing exists without its opposite. So maybe it makes a certain kind of sense that I ended up thinking about the moments you know you’ll forget. Or, more accurately, try to remember incorrectly. How do we all learn how to do that? Relive something again and again in our heads until it takes on a slightly different light, a less truthful tone, until the memory can’t injure us as directly, until it joins the ranks of the more manageable.”

“This wasn’t because he liked me, I was sure. It had more to do with him banking on what we of wedding age had all become witnesses to—how during these wedding weekends, single women, feeling a little lonely, maybe, or just feeling a little too far from being the bride, found themselves loosening their own rules, opting to be more flexible, more quickly.”

“Even now, after Nick had caused me pain, the truth was I didn't want to cause him any. Wasn't that love, after all?”

“Why does it take fear to move you? Why does it take chaos to make us understand exactly what we need to do?”

“I just think people forget what it feels like to really be in love, you know? Like when that’s the only thing in the world that matters. I just don’t want to decide it’s not that important.”

“We loved each other in the same difficult, unusable way where you took turns doing it, instead of ever managing to do it at the same time.”