Mercy

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 things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you’d let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I’ve been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back.

This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty.

Traveling is all very well and good as long as you knew there is a place or person you can call home

If you loved someone, really loved them, would you let them go?

I once heard someone on a bus say that this guy had gotten under her skin. And it struck me as a remarkable thought - that someone would affect you so deeply they'd always be a part of you.

If God wanted us to act on instinct, we wouldn't have the power of reason.

There's a lot of things you can't see if you aren't' looking.

There are some weapons you can't protect yourself against.

The way i see it, love is just a bigger, stickier form of trust.

How foolish it is to run away with a man who's already run away with someone else...

I'd like to say that this time I'd kill myself too..but I've never had that kind of courage.

You have everything," she said slowly, as if she were explaining the order of the world to a small child. "A family, a great job, a lot of people who look up to you. You've got a place to go home to." She smiled a little. "So go.

Why is it that only in the very beginnings of a relationship are you aware of the heat coming from inside a person, of the number of inches you would have to move for your shoulders to brush as if it were an accident?

He thought of the grammar of Gaelic, in which you did not say you were in love withsomeone, but that you “had love toward” her, as if itwere a physical thing you could present and hold—a bundle of tulips, a golden ring, a parcel of tenderness.

The first person you fell in love with stole your heart. The first person you made love with stole your soul. And if these were one and the same, you were damned.

When she had packed all the artifacts that made up their personal history into liquor store boxes, the house became strictly a feminine place. She stood with her hands on her hips, stoically accepting the absence of old Boston Celtics coasters and the tangle of fishing poles, the old dartboard from a Scots pub, the toolbox and downhill skis, the silky patterned ties which sat in the base of one box like a writing mass of snakes. Without these things, one tended to notice the bright eyelet curtains, the vase filled with yawning crocuses, a needlepoint pillow ... Overall, the house looked much like her apartment had eight years ago, before she had met him.

She knew how you went about falling in love; she did not know how you went about falling into trust.

Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy

He was suffering from wanderlust, complicated by the tension of knowing that he was rooted to this town by something as simple as his name.

You can't buy a clean conscience.

Then you're the one." Allie blinked at him. "The one what?" "The one who loves more." ... "You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone always puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? —William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

It was tough to admit to yourself that someone else had more courage than you would in the same situation, or that it was possible to love someone in a way that you had not personally experienced.

Virtual reality is the willing suspension of disbelief,

town. In the back of his

Did you ever look down at yourself and realise that finally you had it all? Did you ever feel that everything was so right in your life you'd have nowhere to go but downhill?

A lie of omission was much simpler than admitting to yourself you were going against the wishes of the person you idolised.