“Was there some basic flaw in her makeup that made her keep falling in love with this man who couldn’t love her back?”

“Pride had kept her running when love had betrayed her.”

“For all your talk, you don't know the first thing about love." Tears spilled over her lashes and rolled down her cheeks. She slipped the chain that held his Super Bowl ring over her head and pressed it into his palm. "I love you, Bobby Tom, and I'll love you till the day I die. But I've never been for sale. I was a free offering all along.”

“Blue hadn’t expected him to come back, and she stumbled on nothing. He grabbed her just as she was about to step into the roller pan. April, who’d been doing some X-rated grinds to “Baby Got Back,” immediately stopped dancing. Jack sat Blue on her feet.”

“Thanks to April,” she whispered, “you have the wedding you’ve dreamed about ever since you were a little girl.”Dean’s boom of laughter was one more reason she loved this man with all her heart.”

“It was a bitch living with your old English teacher, especially when your old English teacher wasn’t old at all, and he had exactly the kind of body that most appealed to her, tall and lean, broad in the shoulder, narrow at the hip. Then there was his brain. It had taken her a lot of years to find that particular part of a man appealing, but she’d finally gotten in the habit, and she couldn’t seem to give it up.”

“She loved Bram in a clear-eyed way she’d never loved her ex-husband, no rose-colored glasses or mindless giddiness, no Cinderella fantasies or false certainty that he’d put her life in order. What she felt for Bram was messy, honest, and soul-deep. He felt like…part of her, the best and the worst. Like someone she wanted to struggle through life with; share triumphs and catastrophes; share holidays, birthdays, every days”