“He wondered why he stayed with her. Just pure laziness, he guessed. He didn't want to go through the emotional turmoil of leaving her. In spite of himself he'd worry about her and it was too much trouble. He'd need another woman right away and that took a lot of talking and arguing and persuading. It was different just to lay a girl but he would need a woman around, and that was the difference. You got used to one and it was less trouble. […]
But there was another reason too. She loved him. She really did. And he knew it. And you can't leave a thing like that. It's a structure and it has an architecture, and you can't leave it without tearing off a piece of yourself. So if you want to remain whole you stay no matter how much you may dislike staying. Juan was not a man who fooled himself very much.”

“When the woman took the earbud, he didn't ask another question. She was a woman on a mission as she placed the tiny device in her ear and said, "This is Special Agent Abby Cameron. Let me talk to Macey McHenry.”

“She cared about him too much, and he was a dangerous person to love. He wouldn't love her back.”

“He knew what she'd be reading first as she started from the beginning, reading what he'd had to say when he was younger, and then growing older, stories at first about tiny mice who lived in families in back of the wall, and stories about school, and apartments in Greenpoint and Carnasie and Flatbush, elves in Ireland that he'd pictured as Pop had told him about them, and the woman with lace on her sleeves.
She kept turning pages, and then halfway through, she whispered, "Water Street."
Thomas knew she was reading now about a boy who listened at a register, thinking about a family, and a lighthouse, and then she turned the next page and took a breath.
It was the story he really wanted her to see: a story about a girl who though less of herself than everyone else did, who worried about everyone, even when she didn't want to, even when it made her irritable. A girl who was afraid, and who hardly knew it yet, but was on her way to being a healer like her mother, because there'd never be anything else for her, and how lucky they were just to know her.”

“He was angry, too, because it would soon be Christmas and he had nothing to give Leslie. It was not that she would expect something expensive; it was that he needed to give her something as much as he needed to eat when he was hungry. […] She wouldn't laugh at him no matter what he gave her. But for his own sake he had to give her something he could be proud of.”

“And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he'd known her he'd needed her.”

“He knew he should be furious, but he couldn’t sustain a decent rage around her. She had too much about her of the ferocious kitten. Something small and fuzzy, just learning it had claws and how to use them”

“I love you, Jonathan," she whispered.
A long arm snaked around her, and he pulled her against his side.
"I know," he said. "I just wanted to be sure you knew it, too.”

“She wanted to leave. I loved her too much to make her stay.”

“The other day, there was a man outside, beckoning to what I though was Has Wounds. … He came back with an older man … he was crying and sobbing, and — he's Has Wounds' owner! … I told him about what I had done … He said that he's been praying for her all of this time too. He'd been crying, he'd been singing — and he thought he was alone in alll this. The nights when I'd wondered … where she was, corresponded with days where he'd wondered where she'd gone. … And this man had cared for her for 16 years! … I said how I had named her, and he said that in 16 years he had never come up with a name for her, because nothing seemed to suit her, and he was amazed to reveal that that was very much her, and he's going to call her that from now on! He begged to repay me somehow … I said listen, the best thing you can do is what you have already done — love her, take care of her, be her owner! …”