Books We Love To Quote

What could you say to the woman you loved, the last time you might ever talk to her? You’re everything to me. You’ve given me the best days of my life. One of the more ignominious features of love was that you could only express it with clichés … it made you sound like a fraud at a time when you were blazing with sincerity. But at the end of the conversation, he found himself saying, “I love you,” and she said it back. And it was enough. Those three well-worn, everyday words got the job done.

Sometimes memory tricks you. Sometimes beauty is best when it’s distant. But even from here, thirty feet away, I know that the reality of her going to match my memory.

What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such a small measure of time contain such enormity? I suddenly realize why people believe in deja vu, why people believe they’ve lived past lives, because there’s no way the years I’ve spent on this earth could possibly encapsulate what I’m feeling. The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations – all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.

I love you for all those reasons—and for a thousand more I have yet to discover.

A woman could do that to you—reach that place in your soul where the best and worst of you was kept. And once she was there, she owned that place and never left.

It took me a long time to understand Daddy was never coming back. I waited for him for months, sitting at the front window of our house in Katy, just west of Houston. Some days I stood at the end of the driveway to watch every car that passed. No matter how often Mama told me to quit looking for him, I couldn’t give up. I guess I thought the strength of my wanting would be enough to make him appear.

“You don’t have to say it back,” he murmured. “For once, I want to have the pleasure of loving someone without asking for anything in return.”

Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

I love you for all those reasons—and for a thousand more I have yet to discover.

He grinned and kissed her again. “I’d rather be insane with you than sane without you.