Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves.

You were a stone wall, a fort in high, unreachable trees, an island, my own island, that no boat could reach.

Another person is, at the heart of it, unknowable. And if you cannot know a person enough to always guess what they’re capable of, you certainly cannot know them enough to hold them in your hands, to control their behavior, to fight, manipulate, cajole or nurse or soothe them into doing what they should or shouldn’t. People will do what they will do. The trick is admitting your own helplessness about that little fact.

But sometimes, too, you have this little feeling of knowing, this fuzzy, gnawing sense that someone will become a major something in your life. You just know that theirs will be a life you will enter and become a part of.

To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery.

You wouldn't match Melanie and me up, and if we hadn't gotten stuck together as lab partners in junior high science, I doubt if we'd have matched us up either. I'm not sure why we even stuck, except that we each probably find the other to be entertaining...Besides I feel like it was a personal mission of mine to broaden Melanie's world, though I think she felt the same for me.

If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person's entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.