Hope, he learned, was sometimes all a person had.
Even when we were standing in the church and I was getting ready to take my vows, I can remember wishing that you were standing there, instead of him. Because I not only still loved you, but loved you beyond measure.
I’m happiest when I’m with you” – Amanda Collier.
Finding something like that in a war is like finding an angel in hell so i kept it with me.
That’s why they say ‘falling in love’ and not something like ‘floating toward love.’ Falling is scary.
Dawson, like Tuck, was one of those rare people who could love only once, and if anything, separation had only made his feelings grow stronger. Two days ago, that realization had been disconcerting, but she now understood that, for Dawson, there had been no other choice. Love, after all, always said more about those who felt it than it did about the ones they loved.
She loved the man he’d been, and she loved the man she knew he could be, but here and now... she felt sad and alone, and she couldn’t help wondering how here life had come to this.
Experience was the most painful of teachers.
Memories are a doorway to the past, and the more one treasures the memories, the wider the door will open.
I’m different now than I was then. Just like I was different at the end of the trip than I’d been at the beginning. And I’ll be different tomorrow than I am today. And what that means is I can never replicate that trip. Even if I went to the same places and met the same people, it wouldn’t be the same.
Guilt, in other words, isn’t always wasted. It can keep us from making the same mistake twice.
It takes over – fear, I mean. No matter how hard you try to fight it, it takes over, crushing the life out of you.
He believed that most people, when given the choice, would do what was right, even when it was hard, and he believed that good almost always triumphed over evil. He wasn’t naive, though. “Trust people,” he would tell me, “until they give you a reason not to. And then never turn your back.
At times, it almost felt like I was destined to take the trip, like all the people I met had somehow been waiting for me.
I love autumn”, Emily said to me. “It wins you over with its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
She understood then, with the distance that maturity brings, how much he’d loved her back then. And still did, something whispered inside her, and all at once she had the strange impression that everything they’d shared in the past had been the opening chapters in a book with a conclusion that had yet to be written.
He knew that Amanda would always be the very best part of him.
Whatever you decide to do, remember that you have to be able to go forward in life without looking back.
That’s the first time you said my name... and I like it.
A truth emerges in any long marriage, and the truth is this: Our spouses sometimes know us better than we even know ourselves.