"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."

"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?"