She squinted up at him. "But I haven't always made good decisions." Pastor Harris smiled. "All that shows is that you're human.

What good is talking if neither of you are really committed? If one of you had an affair or got addicted to drugs or was abusive, simply talking about it wouldn;t take the hurt away; or fix the trust that's been lost. In the end, marriage comes down to actions. I think people talk too much about the things that bother them, instead of actually doing the little things that keep a marriage strong.

People want pretty much the same things: They wanted to be happy. Most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed they lay in the past.

I've learned that we're all entitled to have our secrets.

Even his highly emotional Italian mother didn't believe that true love could blossom overnight. Like his brothers and sisters-in-law, she wanted nothing more for him than to marry and start a family, but if he showed up at her doorstep and said that he'd met someone two days ago and knew she was the one for him, his mother would smack him with a broom, curse in Italian, and drag him to church, sure that he had some serious sins that needed confessing.

It was a lesson that I would learn in time though it wasn't Hegbert who taught me.

While I find inspiration in real life, the actual stories are, thankfully, works of fiction - which, given the considerable turmoil in my character's lives, is probably a good thing!