“Oliver Biddle was who you became if you couldn't find anyone to love except your parents. ”

“He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.”

“Sometimes you’re loved because of your weaknesses. What you can’t do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.”

“With so much sky and so much river, you couldn't help seeing the big picture. It was what you already knew, but crowding into the subway or rushing to a movie, you only saw it for a second, and close up. Now I took a good long look. I'd always heard you couldn't see stars in Manhattan because of all the lights. But here they all were. Here was my night in shining armor.”

“I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again.”

“My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn't exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex any way. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about love.”

“The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.”