1.
I do love you. I think you know that, but just in case...I love you.
Eileen Wilks
 
2.
Fear and bigotry don’t need explaining. They simply are, like traffic jams and taxes.
Eileen Wilks
 
3.
It's okay to play turtle for a while, as long as you don't get too fond of your shell.
Eileen Wilks
 
4.
We don't go to the ocean for anything as simple as happiness, do we? We go there to feel alive. Like life, the ocean holds chance and change, grief and terror and beauty. It promises mortality, not peace.
Eileen Wilks
 
5.
This was what she needed… the quiet turning to the other in the middle of the night, the wordless meeting of lips, skin, breath. The trust, unfurling one pale petal at a time, that he would be there.
Eileen Wilks
 
    
6.
What?" She drew herself up, stern as a cat presented with the wrong food for dinner.
Eileen Wilks
 
7.
But when you slice truth too thin, you deceive.
Eileen Wilks
 
8.
Dogs make sense. They understand hierarchy and the need to cooperate. They come when you call them. A cat though—a cat will take your number and get back to you. Maybe. If he’s in a good mood.
Eileen Wilks
 
    
9.
Women were complicated creatures. Any man who thought he had one figured out simply wasn't paying attention.
Eileen Wilks
 
10.
How to put this feeling, this certainty, into something as limited as words?
Eileen Wilks
 
11.
You're so far off base this time you can't even see the base!
Eileen Wilks
 
12.
Regrets are the most useless form of guilt. They always arrive too late to do any good.
Eileen Wilks
 
13.
Isen wasn't a two birds with one stone kind of guy. More like one stone, two birds, a rabbit, a fox, and maybe that deer will trip over the fox and we can get him, too.
Eileen Wilks
 
14.
People always wanted someone to blame, didn't they?
Eileen Wilks
 
15.
Marriage and especially the ceremony which announces it, the wedding... That is how we say to the world, 'These two are now a family, and with this joining our families are joined, too. And you had damned well better respect that.
Eileen Wilks
 
16.
Don't call the man a claustrophobe just because small spaces scare him. Right.
Eileen Wilks
 
17.
He stared at the heart of his heart, the one woman in the world for him
Eileen Wilks
 
18.
Uh - do you want to do it outside? "Frequently. Oh, you meant the wedding. That, too.
Eileen Wilks
 
19.
Living is very serious, very real. It is also always a game. If we are wise, it is very real, very terrible, and very lovely, and a good deal of fun.
Eileen Wilks
 
20.
My feelings were hurt. Once I started I couldn't seem to let it go. Be strange if the person who matters most in the whole world couldn't hurt your feelings, wouldn't it?
Eileen Wilks
 
21.
Bleeding isn't optional for most of us.
Eileen Wilks
 
22.
Religion turned some folks belligerent.
Eileen Wilks
 
23.
Humans were peculiar. They were by turns squeamish and appallingly violent.
Eileen Wilks
 
24.
Who wants to feel everything everyone else feels all the time?
Eileen Wilks
 
25.
I see you. I will be careful with the places that hurt.
Eileen Wilks
 
26.
Guilt always makes the other feelings worse.
Eileen Wilks
 
27.
Living does not undo life. Death does not, either. Life and death are not either-or.
Eileen Wilks
 
28.
Hating politics was like hating the weather. Pointless, since both were inevitable.
Eileen Wilks
 
29.
Surely a woman who picked a spot so close to the ocean didn't automatically hide from the rain.
Eileen Wilks
 
30.
But not all scars showed, did they?
Eileen Wilks
 
31.
She had of course, kept working. He liked to think she would have moved under the table to continue her task if a gun battle had broken out, but he wasn't sure.
Eileen Wilks