"Intimacy transcends the physical. It is a feeling of closeness that isn’t about proximity, but of belonging. It is a beautiful emotional space in which two become one."

"Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire."

"Don’t answer the door without a shirt! Now, go get dressed before you catch a cold,” I scolded.“Why? He was kinda cute. Do you think he would’ve went for it if I said I didn’t have any money?” Wesley asked.“You’re mine and I wouldn’t let you prostitute yourself for pizza. Now go put on a shirt,” I said, pulling two slices onto a plate."

"Love, he thinks, is a lie that people tell each other in order to make the world bearable. He is not up for the lie anymore. And nobody is going to lie to him like that, anyway. He's not even worth a lie."

"Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring."

"They had met at a club fifteen years before, Etta and Magnus. He had convinced her to dance with him, and she said she had been in love by the end of the song. He told her he had been in love before the beginning."