I understood finally that the thing I should have feared most was not loss, but never loving. The price for safety was the regret I felt at this moment. And yet I would have to live with it for the rest of my life.
It was finally becoming clear to her that love wasn’t about finding someone perfect to marry. Love was about seeing through to the truth of a person, and accepting all their shades of light and dark. Love was an ability.
And then another letter had come from Christopher, so devastating that Amelia wondered how mere scratches of ink on paper could rip someone’s soul to shreds. She had wondered how she could feel so much pain and still survive.
She had discovered that the best remedy for heartache was trying to make herself useful to others.
I’m not here now. This isn’t happening. You’re just visiting a dream of mine.
I closed my eyes, thinking, Let me love you, Hardy, just let me.
You could run to the farthest corners of the earth. There’s no place you could go where I wouldn’t love you. Nothing you could do to stop me.
No marriage stays in the same pattern forever. It is both the best feature of marriage and the worst, that it inevitably changes.
Marriage would change hardly anything between us, except that we would end our arguments in a much more satisfying way. And of course I would have extensive legal rights over your body, your property, and all your individual freedoms, but I don’t see what’s so alarming about that.
Make your choice and accept the consequences.
Sometimes I’m not nice for a reason. It’s a way to find out what someone’s made of.
The Travises who had survived were the most purely stubborn people on earth, the kind who relied on their backbones when their wishbones were broken.
He was my confidant, the person who was always on my side even when he wasn’t taking my side.
He stared at me with bitter understanding. We both knew there was no room in this for friendship. Nothing left but childhood history.
He had found my worst weakness: I was one of those people who was desperate to be needed, to matter to someone.
Once he had taken hold, he did not let go. It was not a handshake, it was a possession.
She smiled at him, though her hazel-green eyes were wary beneath the brim of a sodden hat. Right at that moment, staring at her across the hall, Gideon Shaw, cynic, hedonist, drunkard, libertine, fell hopelessly in love.
A slow smile began on Gideon’s face, and his blue eyes sparkled. With a shake of his head, he put his hand on his chest, as if the sight of her was more than his heart could bear.
Hunt looked like a man who had visited many woman’s beds and knew exactly what to do in them.
His quiet certainty made the ground beneath my feet feel solid. Like someday everything might actually be okay.
Our gazes met. It seemed an entire conversation took place in that one glance. Each of us saw what we needed to know.