Sometimes you’re loved because of your weaknesses. What you can’t do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.

You did the best you could," and she seemed to believe I had. I said, "I've just been going through the motions," using the expression my father had after he'd watched my first tennis lesson. "Sweetie," she said, "that's what a lot of life is.

In the cab to the station, he told me that when he was growing up he'd see a look of pleasure cross his mother's face and ask what she was thinking: she'd say, I was just thinking of your father. "That's how I want us to be," Archie said. I smiled. "What?" I said, "I was just thinking of your father.

The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.

The only relationships I haven't wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.

You can feel that he wants to own you - not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having. He lets you know that you already own him.

Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself. You imagine him being attracted to them. You're drinking gasoline to stay warm.