Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she'd run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.

True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.

She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.

Darling girl, blinded by foolish thoughts of love. How to tell her that the hearts of men were not so easily won. If won, rarely kept.

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.

Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.