“Feelings were clouds across the sky. They would change and pass. It wasn't important how she felt.”

“For what is life but a succession of change; of one thing after another; painful beginnings, fearful setting out into the unknown, leaving what we are for what we have not yet become. We sail forth boldly, keeping a steady keel and a keen eye on the horizon, to reach islands, land whose fragrance we sniff at at the edge of our dreams; and so we sail on, hoping that the next landfall will be our own bit of earth.”

“From sunrise to sunset, from one day to the next, till our black hair turns white, we eat, we sleep, we bear children and we watch them grow. We watch them get married and in turn bear children of their own. How time flies, we say to ourselves. Then one day, we look down at our feet and we're surprised. Roots have sprouted in the ground of our daily living.”

“No great or big changes have ever been done effortlessly.”

“You scare me, Ryan Daley. Even more than those demons outside that scream for my death. How is it that I want what you want? I’ve spent an eternity feeling powerless. Love did that to me — robbed me of all control. I never expected to feel this way again. I don’t want to feel.’‘Neither did I,’ Ryan rasps, ‘because feeling anything at all was dangerous. If I let myself feel, then maybe I’d have to believe what everyone was saying — that Lauren was dead. But from the moment I laid eyes on “Carmen, you kept getting under my skin. At first, all you did was irritate the hell out of me, bailing me up that way outside my house, inviting yourself along for the ride when all I wanted was to be left alone. But that irritation turned into curiosity, which turned into something else, becoming this chain of, of … feeling that brought me here. I dropped everything for you. I veered left. And I’d do it again in a second. That’s what “feeling” does. It tells you you’re alive, it gives things … I don’t know, proper meaning. You’re still trying to maintain some veneer of independence? Toughness? Do words like that even apply to you? But I see through it, Mercy. I see through you. You’re not that different from me after all, under your armour. Crumbs, Mercy, that’s all I’m after. Just crumbs. It’s not a lot to ask for.”

“It might have felt easier if she'd been able to say that she moved across the room to him in a trance, as if he were a vampire exerting some kind of mind control. That would have been a cop-out, though. Not to mention a lie. She was exquisitely aware of every movement she made as she uncurled her legs, rose from her chair and walked slowly and carefully around the end of the coffee table towards him. She felt the wide hem of her yoga pants sway around her ankles, felt the nap of the blue-and-green area rug and then the cool smoothness of the wooden floorboards beneath her feet. She felt the way the thick sofa cushions gave beneath her as she sat beside him and the pull of gravity when his heavier weight made a deeper depression that her body rolled naturally into...And then she felt everything.”

“I can’t be responsible for losing you, the way I almost lost you tonight."The sense of vertigo is so bad now that Ryan seems fuzzy, as if I’m seeing him through a veil of light.‘You’re already responsible,’ Ryan implores. ‘I’m a marked man. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at me. With you, or without you, I’m marked for death. And I’ll take my chances with you. Inany life, given the same choice, I would choose you. Are you hearing me?”