“It was after Nick had left me that I learned the lesson: its when you don't love somebody that you do notice the little things. Then you mind them. You mind them terribly.”

“When you're young, faith is often a matter of rules. What you should do and shouldn't do, that kind of thing. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship - with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community.”

“Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?”

“Sometimes you can just feel a person's decency in the same way that sometimes you can intuit a lack of it. Phil had the air of a man who is fully attentively engaged Josh Hannah's first fiance had the air of a man trying not to look at his watch. Phil consistently interested himself in the lives of others Josh talked about himself. Phil looked at my sister with tenderness and humor Josh looked at her as if she were an especially persistent gnat.”

“I think maybe I'd still nod and smile and have lunch with him. I think maybe I'd still go to the Noam Chomsky documentary later that evening. And maybe I'd even marry him a couple of weeks later. Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?”

“Call me old-fashioned, but whenever I see those wire-fortified ribbons, I have the secret stab of nostalgia for old-timey ribbon, the kind whose ends flop like spaniel ears. I'm suspicious of unnaturally perky ribbon.”

“Phil and Hannah had decided that Christian guilt was better than bad math”