Quotes By Author: Emily Giffin

“The person who wants out of the relationship always gets her way.”

“I decided that giving a girl a ring when you’re not in a serious relationship is sort of like giving a guy a blow job when you have no real feelings for him. It makes everything feel a little cheap.It cheapens the giver and the recipient.”

“Despite the fact that I have no regrets about how things turned out in my life, I still can’t help wanting to understand my intense relationship with Leo, as well as that turbulent time between adolescence and adulthood when everything feels raw and invigorating and scary-and why those feelings are all coming back to me now.”

“I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to explain to Zoe one of the very saddest notions in love and life: sometimes the timing is wrong–and sometimes you realize the heart of the matter way to late in the game.”

“I was aware that we were both silently making those inevitable comparisons, putting our relationship in context. She is more this and less that. He is better or worse in these ways. It is human nature to do this–unless its your first relationship, which might be the very reason that your first relationship feels special and remains forever sacred. But the older you get, the more cynical you become, and the more complicated and convoluted the exercise is. You begin to realize that nothing is perfect, that there are trade-offs and sacrifices. The worst is when someone in your past trumps the person in the present, and you think to yourself: if I’d known this, then maybe I wouldn’t have let him go.”

“I still think I love him more. It’s one of those things you never know for certain because there’s no way to enter all the relationship data in a computer and have it spit out a definitive answer. You can’t quantify love, and if you try, you wind up focusing on misleading factors.”

“I think of how each person in a marriage owes it to the other to find individual happiness, even in a shared life. That this is the only way to grow together, instead of apart.”

“People generally didn’t cheat in good relationships.”

“But now we have time. Endless time stretches before us.”

“But I have learned that you can’t just create your own timetable and will it to come true.”

“I think of how life takes unexpected twists and turns, sometimes through sheer happenstance, sometimes through calculated decisions. In the end, it can all be called fate, but to me, it is more a matter of faith.”

“We are one of those couples i used to watch, thinking to myself that I’d never be on the inside of something so special. I remember reassuring myself that it probably looked nicer than it actually was, I am happy to be wrong about that.”

“I love him wholly and unconditionally and without reservation. I love him enough to sacrifice a friendship. I love him enough to accept my own happiness and use it, in turn, to make him happy back.”

“I miss us too. I always have and I probably always will. Sometimes there are no happy endings. No matter what, I’ll be losing something, someone. But maybe that’s what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice again and again, day in and day out, year after year,says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.”

“…love is the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together.”