“A woman needs to feel safe in love. She needs to know her husband accepts everything about her and still loves her. To be known through and through, including the failures of her past, the shortcomings of her character, and still be loved, that's the Promised Land of a woman's heart! That's where she finds rest.”

“In love! She wafted through her day like a woman with a concussion.”

“Over and over I had to reassure her. “You hate me,” she would say. “Lori, I don’t hate you. I love you.” Finally it began to dawn on me. When she challenged me like that, she wasn’t making a statement. She was asking a question. And she needed to hear the answer. She needed to hear that I still accepted her. She needed to hear that I still cared for her. Over and over again she needed to hear me tell her that I loved her.”

“Then she would wander through fields, over simple, poor land, looking carefully and keenly all round her, still getting used to being alive in the world, and feeling glad that everything in it was right for her — for her body, her heart, and her freedom.”

“The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides. True beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It's the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows & the beauty of a woman only grows with passing years.”

“It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their ove its shape.After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns toward me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story.”