“While she was exceptional, I was average, a man whose major accomplishment in life was to love her without reservation, and that would never change.”

Someone Like You (1998)

Source: Safe Haven

"Scholar and Carpenter", reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Context: p>The while He sits whose name is Love,
And waits, as Noah did, for the dove,
To wit if she would fly to him.He waits for us, while, houseless things,
We beat about with bruised wings
On the dark floods and water-springs,
The ruined world, the desolate sea;
With open windows from the prime
All night, all day, He waits sublime,
Until the fulness of the time
Decreed from His eternity.</p

Source: Winter Dreams

first lines.
Nude Men (1993)

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood

Norman Rockwell is Bleeding (2004)

Source: Under a Glass Bell