I cared about her as a person, as a soul, and I wanted to fuck her, and that was the recipe for something much worse than carnal sin. It was a recipe for falling in love.

We weren't ashamed to enjoy food and alcohol in moderation - why were we so afraid of sex?

A man and a woman wanting each other is by far one of the least sinful things I've seen

The pain of one-sided love, of knowing that I had loved her more than she had loved me

Could a vow be not all the way broken? Could a sin be not all the way committed?

Life is a spiral. As long as we lived, we would keep moving forward. But on a spiral path, getting closer to your destination meant periodically passing the same things—emotions, issues, character flaws—over and over again, the way a person walking up a spiral staircase would continually find himself facing north every ten steps or so.