The brain of a person in love will show activity in the amygdala, which is associated with gut feelings, and in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with rewarding stimuli that tends to be active in drug abusers. Or, to recap: the brain of a person in love doesn't look like the brain of someone overcome by deep emotion. It looks like the brain of a person who's been snorting coke.

Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.

That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes. I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

Any highway . . . they all take you to the same place, don't they?

She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.

You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever

You can't be real," Delilah murmurs. "Says who?" I ask. "Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?