“I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.”

“What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?”

“My mother had more than once remarked that my father was one of the war's casualties, that the Sam Hall who came back wasn't the one who left, the one she'd fallen in love with. I didn't doubt that she believed this certain truth, or even that it was true, after a fashion. But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth--that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.”

“Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced his mother that Browning summer. It was the worst lie there was, imprisoning and ultimately embittering the hearer, playing upon her terrible need to believe. He could feel the I love you forming on his lips. Would he have said it if she hadn't interrupted?”

“There have been times," Father Mark admitted, "when I feared that God would turn out to be like my maternal grandmother [...] Ours was a large family, and every Christmas my grandmother gave gifts of cash in varying amounts, claiming she was rewarding her grandchildren according to how much they loved her. She swore she could look right into our hearts and know. One child would get a crisp fifty-dollar bill, the next a crumpled single. No two gifts were ever in the same amount."Miles nodded. "Well, maybe there's a hell.”

“For Miles, one of the great mysteries of marriage was that you had to actually say things before you realized they were wrong. Because he'd been saying the wrong thing to Janine for so many years, he'd grown wary, testing most of his observations in the arena of his imagination before saying them out loud, but even then he was often wrong. Of course, the other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get. Wrong, all of it, to one degree or another, by definition, or by virtue of the fact that Miles himself was the one saying it.”

“The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.”