“Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.I love you still among these cold things.Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vesselsthat cross the sea towards no arrival.I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there. My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.I love what I do not have. You are so far.My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.But night comes and starts to sing to me.”

“No, you love to confuse me and drive me crazy. You don't really love me. You don't know what love is." "Yeah, I think I do." His brows lowered, and he took a step toward her. "I have loved you my whole life, Delaney. I can't remember a day when I didn't love you. I loved you the day I practically knocked you out with a snowball. I loved you when I flattened the tires on your bike so I could walk you home. I loved you when I saw you hiding behind the sunglasses at the Value Rite, and I loved you when you loved that loser son of a bitch Tommy Markham. I never forgot the smell of your hair or the texture of your skin the night I laid you on the hood of my car at Angel Beach. So don't tell me I don't love you. Don't tell me--" His voice shook and he pointed a finger at her. "Just don't tell me that.”

“Tis quite true. If I had gone for love o' you, if I had ever sincerely loved you, if I loved you still, I should not so loathe and hate myself for my weakness as I do now! ... My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.”

“But when it comes to life or love, I choose life. I’m here right now, ready to live and love another day. I could never regret that. I’m glad you didn’t love me. You gave me my life by doing so.”

“I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

“I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.”