I didn't expect it was going to be easy. But hard work is a lot easier to tolerate when it's something you want to do instead of something you have no choice about.

One of the blessings human beings take for granted is the ability to remember pain without re-feeling it. The pain of the physical wounds is long gone …and the other kind of hurt, the damage done to our spirits, has been healed. We are careful with those scarred places in each other.

I never lie for the sake of kindness,” he murmured, smiling. “One of my many flaws.

Then he raised her enough to whisper in her ear, and while his voice was tender, his words were savage. "You're my woman, and no man or God or ghost will ever take you from me.

She had always maintained a cynical facade, using it as a defence against embarrassment, fear, loneliness… but at the moment she felt unusually vulnerable.

You're surrounded by it wherever you go, you walk through it, breathe it...it's in your lungs and under your tongue and between your fingers and toes.

I'm not the marrying kind -" St. Vincent snorted. "No man is. Marriage is a female invention.