Uncommon Passion Quotes

“All anyone wants is someone to walk with them,” Sam said quietly. Rachel. So strong, and so alone. And he’d been teaching her to walk alone. He wanted to watch her do everything. Come apart under him, discover who she was now, who she’d be in a month, a year, a decade. He wanted to watch her live. Rachel was the kind of woman who’d be different every time he came home after a shift, and there was another thought he couldn’t shake—Rachel in his apartment when he came home, or maybe in a house they bought together. He’d tried to force her to disconnect, to treat life like he did, as a dip in the shallow end of pleasure. Meaningless. Empty. He’d done what he did with every other woman, made it hot and fast and rough, and she’d called him on it. His apartment was empty, missing even the promise of Rachel. His life was empty of that as well, and of Sam, even though Sam had been back for a decade. That’s what was inside him. Emptiness.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“Jesus God, Ben,” Sam said, then swallowed hard. “Is that why you do this? Make it easy for people to leave?” “Sam, don’t ask me why,” he said. “Do I strike you as even remotely self-aware?”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“Ben asked the hard question, the one she didn’t have a good, simple answer for. They needed me to be someone I am not. They expected me to surrender all choice and control in my life to God, and if God’s direction wasn’t clear, my pastor or my father would explain it to me. But on the days when she felt some winged creature inside her, talons latched around her heart, beating its wings against her ribs, safety and salvation seemed distant, and untouchable. “I didn’t fit in anymore,” she said.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“She was so goddamn beautiful, the way things that could end you were. Guns. Knives. The tawny bird of prey she resembled.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“In all her hours with Ben, his naked body against hers, inside hers, she’d never felt as dirty and ashamed as she did when the men who used to rule her world judged her in the Silent Circle Farm parking lot.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“He wanted Rachel. Slow and passionate and deep as the ocean. But Rachel asked more of him than he could give. Fuck dilemmas. Fuck rocks and hard places. The razor-sharp edge of who she was hovered over his paper-thin excuse for a soul. He didn’t want that blade to fall. He couldn’t bear to push it away, either.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion