She knows the truth can cause a sharp pain behind your eyes and that love sometimes feels like a fist around your throat.

The best way to prevent a heartache was to cushion the coming blow.

But there's a part of me that wonders what it would be like to be the most important person to someone else, to always feel like you were missing a piece of yourself when he wasn't near you.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

There are so many ways a family can unravel. All it takes is a tiny slash of selfishness, a rip of greed, a puncture of bad luck. And yet, woven tightly, family can be the strongest bond imaginable.

But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?

I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I'd hurt Rob. Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded...

You don't love someone because they're perfect, she says. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty-five years that the...

I don't know. But I know that I'm at the stage of my life where I want , not .I know that the first person I kissed won't be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.And I also know better than...

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

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

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.

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...

Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.

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...

You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

Life is hard, so what? It's hard for everyone, isn't it? Anyone who says it's easy is a liar.

Here's an idea, Rosie. Why don't you jus

I'd live anywhere, - in one room, in the castle ruin right now – if it meant we could all just be together.

I told you I'd find you.

Maybe love is thinking that every time your partner does or says something mundane that you want to start a Mexican wave from here to Uzbekistan in utter delight.

I don't know why men like to barbecue so much. Maybe its the only thing they can cook. Or maybe they're just closet pyromaniacs.

Not like a heart, which let people in without permission, held them in a special place she never had any say in and then yearned for them to remain there longer than they planned.

Her best friend was gone and nobody understood that no amount of makeup, fresh air or shopping was going to fill the hole in her heart.

He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with my life. But if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something or someone, it was him.

Most of all she loved that when she hugged him her head would rest neatly just below his chin, where she could feel his breath lightly blowing her hair and tickling her head.

Ah, no difficulties can ever daunt me,' replied d'Artagnan: 'my only fear is, of impossibilities.''Nothing is impossible,' said the lady, 'to the one who truly loves.''Nothing, madame?''Nothing' she...

Had she stabbed me with a knife, she could not have hurt me more.

She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.

Men," said Mr. Kyle, "people have been trying to understand dogs ever since the beginning of time. One never knows what they'll do. You can read every day where a dog saved the life of a drowning...