“You are beautiful and brilliant and bold and so very passionate about life and love and those things that you believe in. And you taught me that everything I believed, everything I thought I wanted, everything I had spent my life espousing--all of it...it is wrong. I want your version of life...vivid and emotional and messy and wonderful and filled with happiness. But I cannot have it without you.”

“Dear Sixpence,I saved them all, you know. Every letter you ever sent, even those to which I never replied. I’m sorry for so many things, my love: that I leftyou; that I never came home; that it took me so long to realize that you were my home and that, with you by my side, none of the restmattered.But in the darkest hours, on the coldest nights, when I felt I’d lost everything, I still had your letters. And through them, in some small way,I still had you.I loved you then, my darling Penelope, more than I could imagine—just as I love you now, more than you can know.MichaelHell House, February 1831”

“Juliana?” the words were low and far—too calm for her husband, who had found that he rather enjoyed the full spectrum of emotion now that he had experienced it.“Yes?”“What are you doing twenty feet in the air?”“Looking for a book.”“Would you mind very much returning to the earth?”“What are you thinking, climbing to the rafters in your condition?”“I am not an invalid, Simon, I still have use of all my extremes.”“You do indeed—particularly your extreme ability to try my patience—I believe, however, that you mean extremities.”

“She looked up at him and said,"What did you say?""You have beautiful eyes.""You told my father that he has beautiful eyes?"He smiled. "No. You distracted me. I told your father that, while I was very grateful for the lesson, I doubt I would ever need of it again- because I was planning to court only one woman in my lifetime.”

“I had a perfect life in my reach once, and it was a crashing bore. Perfect is too clean, too easy. I don't want perfect any more than I want to be perfect. I want imperfect.”

“..Instead of Ralston saying any number of wonderful things that could have been appropriate for the precise situation in which they had found themselves -from You are the most unparalleled female I have ever known, to How can I ever live without you now that I've found heaven in your arms, to I love you, Callie, more than I had ever dreamed to even Shall we have another go?- he'd gone and mucked it up by apologizing.”

“She was all he wanted. He would give everything for her. Without thought. Without regret.”