if you didn't let some things go, you'd spend your whole life fighting. - Gabrielle Zevin

Sam looked at her outstretched hand, which he knew as well as any hand except his own — -the precise pattern of the lines that made up the grid of her palm, the slim fingers with the purplish veins at the knuckles, the particular creamy olive hue of her skin, her delicate wrist, pinkish, with a penumbral callus that must have come from Dov, the white gold bracelet she wore that he knew had been a gift from Freda on her twelfth birthday. How could she honestly think he wouldn't know about the handcuffs? He had spent hours sitting next to her, playing games and then making them, staring at her hands as her fingers flew across a keyboard or jabbed at a controller. Tell me I don't know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don't know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

Because the things we don't have are sadder than the things we have. Because the things we don't have exist in our imaginations, where they are perfect.