“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”

“He was so different from her, yet in his presence she felt the possibility of another kind of life, a life she had never imagined could be hers. A life without the rigid limitations others had always set for her.”

“She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.”

“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”

“No little appetite or pain, no carelessness or meanness in him escaped her; no thought or dream or longing in him ever reached her. And yet several times in her life she had seen the stars.”

“So softly death succeeded life in her,
She did but dream of heaven, and she was there.”

“In her heart she longed for this man, dreamed of a life that could never be.”

“One day, she’d find a way to live her life to the fullest. She was sure of it. She just had no idea how she would manage it.”

“Back to him she would never go, but in her lonely life still lived the sweet memory of that happy time when she believed in him and he was all in all to her.”

“She would tell him what she wanted in her life--her hopes and dreams for the future--and he would listen intently and then promise to make it all come true. And the way he said it made her believe him, and she knew how much he meant to her.”