It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it’s this way for everyone.

I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again.

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.

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.

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.

It scares me. But then I get this big feeling, simple but exalted: He's like me, just with different details.