“No one is ever quite ready; everyone is always caught off guard. Parenthood chooses you. And you open your eyes, look at what you've got, say "Oh, my gosh," and recognize that of all the balls there ever were, this is the one you should not drop. It's not a question of choice.”
“Even if someone wasn't perfect or even especially good, you couldn't dismiss the love they felt. Love was always love; it had a rightness all its own, even if the person feeling the love was full of wrongness.”
“Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up.”
“Happiness isn't what happens when you whistle along, pretending bad things don't exist. . . Happiness is earned, like everything else. It's achieved. ”
“We talked and talked and talked. Maybe love comes in at the eyes, but not nearly as much as it comes in at the ears, at least in my experience. As we talked, lights flicked on inside my head; by the end of the night I was a planterium.”
“There's a kind of holiness to love, requited or not, and those people who don't receive it with gratitude are arrogant beyond saving.”
“I spoke, I listened, and my heart broke, which is to say that it didn't break at all but became suddenly aware of its own wholeness in such a way it hurt like hell.”
“There are people whose deaths make you ache with sadness. And then there are people whose deaths prevent the sun from rising, deaths that turn the walls black in every room you walk through, deaths that send storm clouds and a wail swirling through your head so that you can't hear music and you can't recognize your furniture or your own face in the mirror.”
“I don’t think love is blind, true love is probably the most clear-eyed state of being there is.’
‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe with true love, you see and you love anyway…”
“I don't think love is blind, but wanting to be in love, that's probably blind.”
“But sometimes, a boat needs to rock; a boat needs to head straight for the heart of a storm and come out on the other side, weather beaten but with flags flying.”
“Yes, it’s true, what I said earlier: A real life doesn’t mean geting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too, is knowing what you love.But getting what you love? Having what you love love you back? Oh, my friend, it’s miracle: your one tiny life’s head-on collision with divinity. ”
“What do you do when you're in love with the last man in the world you can have? You plan a life, a real life, without him.”
“In certain situations, you can't worry about how people will react. You just hyave to be as honest as you can and let what happens afterward happen.”
“If you're going to rip someone off, it might as well be Audrey Hepburn.”
“Magic can happen in a car, a warm, intimate magic born of being in an enclosed, particular place and, simultaneously, being nowhere, passing throu. No one leaves her troubles behind, not really, but you can believe you have. You can believe you're in an inbetween space where trouble can't find you. . . .”
“A real life doesn't mean getting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too is knowing what you love.”
“You know what I mean. That moment in a relationship in which, at the same time you discover you've been floating in air for 5 and 1/2 weeks you also discover that your feet have dropped a little closer to earth.”
“It was the first time! Just because there weren’t fireworks the first time doesn’t mean there will never be fireworks. We’re human; we’re adults; we teach each other; we communicate; fireworks don’t just go off, wham-bang; fireworks evolve!’
Awestruck by the utter, asinine nonsense of this metaphor, everyone is still. Into the stillness, the ample woman drops the word ‘Wrong.’ Then she says it again. ‘Wrong…I’m talking about science…Pheromones.’ The woman turns to Cornelia. ‘The chemicals in his body call out. The chemicals in your body answer. It either happens or it doesn’t.’
On top of being dumb, Cornelia is dumbfounded.”
“But every time, what brought me to my senses was my conviction that before a person dropped a new life into this world, she should probably get a real one herself.”
“All those films in which the woman doesn't get her man, those films of yearning unsatisfied, hearts unappeased. You like them; I've liked them too. But I'll tell you what: try belonging body and soul to a man who will never belong to you; see how well you like those films then. "Don't ask for the moon-we have the stars!" ... "Pardon me saying so, but fuck the fucking stars!”
“There’s a kind of holiness to love, requited or not, and those people who don’t receive it with gratitude are arrogant beyond saving.”
“But you're wrong. Happiness is EARNED, like everything else. It's achieved.”
“Whatever word you use to describe diving into the deepest part of a human. Take your pick; they're all woefully inadequate, but they're also all we have.”
“My life - my real life - started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a perfectly cut suit, and, yes I know how that sounds.”
“It's ok to feel happy, right? She hoped he'd know what she meant.”
“Clare wasn't worried anymore about their being mean to each other. She imagined that someday she's be part of a friendship in which she and the friend thought so highly of each other and were so sure or this that they could say anything.”
“Soldiers in the heat of battle; death-row prisoners; explorers stranded in deserts, jungles, on mountaintops; anyone sick or lost or just tired and bewildered: we all wanted our mothers.”
“The examples seemed to fall into two categories: girls who used sweetness and girls who used pluck.”
“Linney moves in the world with such firm, certain steps, being with her can make you forget your own confusion, at least for a little while.”
“This was why she enjoyed baking. A good dessert could make her feel like she'd created joy at the tips of her fingers. Suddenly, the people around the table were no longer strangers. They were friends and confidantes, and she was sharing with them her magic.”
“Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.”
“If you treat an animal right, they don't run away. They're not like us. They run away from people they don't trust; most times we run away from ourselves.”
“The real journey of the Indian aerospace programme, however, had begun with the Rohini Sounding Rocket (RSR) Programme. What is it that distinguishes a sounding rocket from a Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV) and from a missile? In fact, they are three”
“Later I stirred again, knowing the night was passing, but unwilling to wake fully lest this fair vision be lost forever. There was an arm across me, holding the cloak around me; and the same old blanket covered the two of us. Darragh lay behind me, his body curled neatly against my own, his living warmth a part of me, his slow peaceful breathing steady against my hair. I kept quite still. I did not allow myself to return to full consciousness. I thought, if it all ended right now, I wouldn’t mind a bit. Let it end now, so I need never wake. And I slipped back into sleep.”
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