“It hadn’t been so long ago, yet sometimes she felt that she’d been an altogether different person back then.”

“The world is a better place when you smile.”

“EVERYONE MAKES MISTAKES, EVEN THE PERSONS WE LOVE.”

“You might not understand, but I gave you the best of me, and after you left, nothing was ever the same.”

“Marriage is a partnership, not a democracy.”

“As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man — the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn’t exist.”

“I’ve never been afraid of them. Not once. Because I had you.”

“Logan stopped and gazed skyward as the kite began to soar above them, and when he clapped his hands at Ben’s obvious joy, she was strucked by the simple truth that sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people.”

“If pinpointing God’s presence were really that simple, then he supposed the beaches would be more crowded in the mornings. They would be filled with people on their own quests, instead of people jogging or walking their dogs or fishing in the surf.”

“Distance can ruin even the best of intentions.But I suppose it depends on how you look at it.Distance just adds a richness you would not otherwise get.People come. People go. They will drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book.When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their stories and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones. Not the ones from the past.”

“I love you now for what we’ve already shared, and I love you now in anticipation of all that’s to come.”

“I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.”

“Every time I read to her, it was like I was courting her, because sometimes, just sometimes, she would fall in love with me again, just like she had a long time ago. And that’s the most wonderful feeling in the world. How many people are ever given that chance? To have someone you love fall in love with you over and over?”

“Deep in her heart, she wasn’t sure she deserved to be happy, nor did she believe that she was worthy of someone who seemed…normal.”

“If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been.”