-- "Only because I adore you beyond reason am I doing this. I have spent a lot of time avoiding road trips, meeting girls' families, and Christmas. The fact that I am enduring all three at once proves that I love you."
-- I want my own bed, in my own apartment. Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must be home. Clare sighs, turns her head, and is quiet. Hi, honey, I'm home. I'm home.
--"But don't you think," I persist, "that it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?"
--We are walking down the street, holding hands. There's a playground at the end of the block and I run to the swings and climb on, and Henry takes the one next to me, facing the opposite direction, and we swing higher and higher, passing each other, sometimes in synch and sometimes streaming past each other so fast it seems like we're going to collide, and we laugh, and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.
--"Do you ever lie awake wondering if I'm some kind of joke God is playing on you?"
"No. I lie awake worrying that you might disappear and never come back. “
-"Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion."
-"Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. "
-"Few men can keep alive through a big surf to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind: and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband, her white arms round him pressed as though forever."