“Nash has been the sun lighting up the horizon of my life, outshining everything else in my world. I'd thought once that he was to good to be true. Turns out I was right.”

“I walked out of his room sure I'd said the right thing maybe not as a father but as a Dad. I'd said the right thing, for once in my life.”

“As it turned out, Welcome was where I lost everything, and gained everything. Welcome was the place where my life was guided from one track to another, ending me to places I'd never thought of going.”

“I mean, creatures who only exist in the dark don't know they're missing the sun, right? But once you've seen the sun. Once you've seen it light up the world ... once you've felt its heat all around you ... inside you ..." He clutched his own chest, and my heart cracked open. "Its hard to live in the dark after the sun dies.”

“...I thought he was the man I'd been waiting for. A hero right out of Austen. The one who would finally make everything okay. Only he wasn't real. Like Austen's characters, he was fiction. Mr. Darcy broke my heart.”

“For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget.”