The Best of Me

by Nicholas Sparks

Instead, it had more to do with the sense that somehow she’d lost sight of the person she’d once meant to be, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever have the opportunity to find that person again.

Unlike her, Tuck seemed to embrace the role that the world had laid out for him. She recognized that there was probably wisdom in that kind of unflinching acceptance, even if she’d never be able to achieve it.

The past can be escaped only by embracing something better, and he figured that was what she’d done.

Life was messy. Always had been and always would be and that was just the way it was, so why bother complaining? You either did something about it or you didn’t, and then you lived with the choice you made.

the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. What the younger generation didn’t understand was that the grass was greenest where it’s watered,

Because I knew even then how rare that kind of love is. Only the luckiest people get to experience it at all.”

It takes a long time to grow an old friend, and trust is built a single moment at a time.

Love, after all, always said more about those who felt it than it did about the ones they loved.

“Being together isn’t about a honeymoon. It’s about the real you and me. I want to wake up with you beside me in the mornings, I want to spend my evenings looking at you across the dinner table. I want to share every mundane detail of my day with you and hear every detail of yours. I want to laugh with you and fall asleep with you in my arms. Because you aren’t just someone I loved back then. You were my best friend, my best self, and I can’t imagine giving that up again.”

“You might not understand, but I gave you the best of me, and after you left, nothing was ever the same.”