“Mars knew that love wasn't all red-paper valentines and candy hearts. Love wasn't always joy. Love could be hot-blooded pain down to the bone. Sometimes love was despair. And sometimes love was wrong.”

“Even if someone wasn't perfect or even especially good, you couldn't dismiss the love they felt. Love was always love; it had a rightness all its own, even if the person feeling the love was full of wrongness.”

“And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.”

“For above all, love is a sharing. Love is a power. Love is a change that takes place in our own heart. Sometimes it may change others, but always it changes us.”

“In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt?”

“Love wasn't to be measured, much less restricted, by methodology. Love wasn't a method. Love was a faculty of the highest order, imagined or unimagined. Love wasn't an activity. Love was an experience. Love was the second coming of innocence.”