"So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream."

"I don't think we get a choice in who we fall for," Ian whispers. "I think we just do."

"Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines."

"Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom."

"I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces."

"When you love someone you let them take care of you."

"My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her."

"When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth."

"The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been."

"I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not."

"and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart."

"I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same."

"You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride."

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"

"You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not."

"When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires"

"Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far."

"And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt."

"Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence."

"Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey."

"If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going."

"You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals."