“She did not know what she had expected from her Dante, but she definitely hadn’t received it. So with the wisdom that comes only from having experienced a broken heart, she resolved to let him go once and for all.”

“When the only answer a little girl ever receives is no, from her parents or her teachers or her world, at some point she stops asking for what she wants. She begins to expect nothing, so as not to be disappointed when that exactly what she gets. But, it turns out, I do have wants.”

“But he was not her Gabriel. Her Gabriel was dead. Gone. Leaving behind only vestiges of him in the body of a harsh and tortured clone. Gabriel had almost broken Julia’s heart once. She was determined she would not let him break her heart for the second time.”

“She had seemed to need something from him that he hadn’t been able to give...at last he realized that what she had needed from him was need itself. That he should need her as she needed him.”

“She pressed her hand against her chest. No heart. So where did the love she felt come from?”

“Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.”