"Here's a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to."

"What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior."

"If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?"

"All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here."

"The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we're supposed to."

"My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct."

"Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person."

"He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable"

"I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him."

"How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?"

"I think you can love a person too much.You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else."

"How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?"

"Someone real," I hear myself saying. "Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like I've known my whole life, even if I haven't."

"What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?"

"People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more."

"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."