“Unfortunately, years of schooling can’t teach you about recovering from heartbreak the way experience can.”— Melissa Hill, nytimes.com
“Absence was in the air, but presence too. My security guard lingered nearby.”— Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, nytimes.com
“Twenty years and two children later, I am still with that same man. I don’t need him, but I want him in my life.”— Karen Rinaldi, nytimes.com
“Finally, surrender became not just inevitable but exhilarating. I didn’t want to hold on to anything anymore. I wanted to fall, and I already had. And I knew that this time, too, I would be O.K.”— Natalie Lindeman, nytimes.com
“Maybe it was the way he said, ‘I’d rather spend my summer with you than any other girl.’ Maybe it was how being around him made me forget the brace and the wounds, made me feel whole and unbroken.”— Natalie Lindeman, nytimes.com
“The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you in the very quick and…”— John Green, Colin, amazon.com
“But the pleasure isn't owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”— Philip Roth, amazon.com
“Most people I know have a Jeremy in their lives, someone whose consequence a label can’t capture.”— Jordana Narin, nytimes.com
“But by not calling someone, say, ‘my boyfriend,’ he actually becomes something else, something indefinable. And what we have together becomes intangible. And if it’s intangible it can never end because officially there’s nothing to end. And if it never ends, there’s no real closure, no opportunity t…”— Jordana Narin, nytimes.com
“There is't enough skin, enough spit, enough time, for the lost years that our lips are trying to make up for as they find each other. We kiss. The electric current switches to high. The lights throughout all of Brooklyn must be surging.”— Gayle Forman, Adam, amazon.com
“I run my finger along her neck, her jawline, and then cup her chin in my hand. And stop. We stand there for a moment, staring at each other, savoring it. And then all at once, we slam together.”— Gayle Forman, Adam, amazon.com
“Our skins reach outward, like magnets, long deprived of their opposite charge”— Gayle Forman, Adam, amazon.com
“But now, more than three years after our first kiss and more than a year after our first time, I’m still not over the possibility of him, the possibility of us. And he has no idea.”— Jordana Narin, nytimes.com
“And in the end, my married friends were right: There may be a limit to passion, but love flourishes.”— Marc Jaffe, nytimes.com
“I believed I should not allow her to love me . . . But she was also a woman, beautiful and vibrant, and I was a man — in a wheelchair, true — but a man full of heat and desire that sometimes rendered the chair irrelevant.”— Gary Presley, nytimes.com
“Only now have I begun to see that letting go and trusting in the unknown doesn’t have to mean driving off a cliff, that leaps can be leaps of faith.”— Kelly Thomas, nytimes.com
“I don’t know what else could have happened. But I wonder what we collectively lose as we try so hard not to care.”— Emma Court, nytimes.com
“My generation treats every liaison as if it is happening on an airplane, as if we have only that one night and there is no tomorrow.”— Emma Court, nytimes.com
“It’s just that my generation has turned this avoidance into a science, perfecting the separation of the physical from the emotional. We truncate whenever possible: texting over calling, meeting over apps rather than in person.”— Emma Court, nytimes.com
“I worried that I may never again feel as completely safe and at ease as I did making funny voices for a French bulldog with him by my side, but you can’t control how someone else feels.”— Tonya Malinowski, nytimes.com