“Anne has small superstitions which she uses to dispel anxieties. For instance, if she can make it to the fourth stain on the carpet by the time the elevator door closes, that means Nate has thought positively about her today, and there is a future where they know each other. It becomes a one-sided competition when a negative consequence is imagined: if she cannot touch two different kinds of tile with her feet by the time the toilet flushes, that means she said something crucially “wrong” in an email, and Nate will never contact her again. She doesn't keep track of which side is winning.”

“Pippin?""Yes, Dash?""How did we get here?""Aboard this ship?" she teased. "Nate ordered the sails raised and then --""Very funny," he said, cutting her off. "You know what I mean. Here. To this place.""Oh, this place," she said, her face growing solemn. "I've wondered that as well, and all I can think of is that we are like our stars.""How so?""You and I are the two outer stars, and the one between us is everything that keeps us apart."He set his lips together and gazed out at the waves. "Like this ocean," he offered.”

“So she hadn't completely lost her sense of propriety -- and for some reason he was glad of that. Yet even as he looked at her, there was that mischievous sparkle in her eyes again despite her protest.A sparkle. An odd light as incongruous as her red hair.No, he was imagining things. But where was the expected admonishment on propriety, the lecture on proper restraint? Just when he thought he understood the lady, knew how to knot up her corset strings and keep her at sixes and sevens, she'd turned the tide on him.What had she said? You are not a man easily understood.Perhaps she understood him better than he'd given her credit for.”

“He said someday I would come home and regret ever leaving."She murmured something, perhaps her own remembrance of a place lost. "Do you?" she said after some time."Yes . . . I mean to say, no," he corrected. "Oh, bother, I don't know.""Don't fret over it. You can't get back the time you've lived, and all you have is what is before you," she said sagely."Egads, I find myself betrothed to a bluestocking," he teased. "Who was that, Aristotle?"She laughed. "No, Aunt Bedelia.”

“Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.”

“She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone.”

“She thought of the hardness and the coldness she had cultivated over those years and wondered if they were the mask she wore or if the mask had become her self. If the longing inside her for kindness, for warmth, for compassion, was the last seed of hope for her, she didn't know how to nurture it or if it could live.”