“She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi.”

“Some men you know are Southern before they ever say a word," Julia said as she and Emily watched Sawyer's progress, helpless, almost as if they couldn't look away. "They remind you of something good--picnics or carrying sparklers around at night. Southern men will hold doors open for you, they'll hold you after you yell at them, and they'll hold on to their pride no matter what. Be careful what they tell you, though. They have a way of making you believe anything, because they say it that way.”

“To think, after all this time, after all the searching and all the waiting, after all the regret and the time she'd spent away, she came back to find that happiness was right where she's left it.On a football field in Mullaby, North Carolina.Waiting for her.”

“So you stay, you don't tell anyone, is that it?""Sure," Della Lee said easily."That's blackmail.""Add it to my list of sins.""I don't think there's room left on that list," Josey said as she took a dress from its hanger. Then she closed the closet door on Della Lee.”

“She'd assumed she'd be married and have kids by this age, that she would be grooming her own daughter for this, as her friends were doing. She wanted it so much she would dream about it sometimes, and then she would wake up with the skin at her wrists and neck red from the scratchy lace of the wedding gown she'd dreamed of wearing. But she'd never felt anything for the men she'd dated, nothing beyond her own desperation. And her desire to marry wasn't strong enough, would never be strong enough, to allow her to marry a man she didn't love.”

“She accepted it from then on. Books liked her. Books wanted to look after her.”

“She knew what it felt like to stand in front of someone and ask them to love you, to try to pull them to you by the sheer force of your desire, a force so strong it felt as though you were going to die from it.”