This Is a Love Story Quotes

“It is something, I think, how everyone believes they’re your favorite. It has something to do with your attention to detail. Just being with you feels like being chosen, winning a prize.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“Central Park Some people come to the Park because they want to fall in love for the first time, the twelfth time, the final time. Some have been used, widowed, or bored stiff. They have spent the past decade in deep introspection, falling in love with themselves—and no one else—first. Some come for a short respite—roughly twenty blocks west to east, east to west—from a spouse who will not help themselves or from no one home (she even took the dog; you can’t imagine the sudden quiet). The Park is a beating heart, an adagio, a dreamy parenthesis.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“The Park is a beating heart”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“The difference between stopping and ending is that one is intentional. Anything can be a beginning if you say it right. Any moment can be the end.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“A story must only be as long as a piece of string.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“We had our bumps. You remember it wasn’t always easy, but so often it was. How lucky are we? Sometimes, over the top is just enough.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“You exhale loudly. At first, I lurch toward you. It is habit. Then I remember the meaning of breath. You are still alive. I exhale too. How many times have we sat here like this? How many exhales together? Apart? How many more?”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“And then I want to say something about how marriage is a relay race. Or long loops around the track. One gets ahead. Then the other. Then the other. Or maybe like the ocean. A wave crashes in two places at different times.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“You remember how we used to sit on the sofa and read the same books so we could talk about them as soon as we both were done.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“Some days, I watch the rise and fall of the white blanket on your chest and I put my hand above it just to be with you.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“When was it—months later?—that you let me carry you and tuck you in on the sofa so you could nap? I’ll never forget it. It was the first time you let me touch you, really touch you, again. You were silk across my arms.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“I remember, after that, it wasn’t you but me who reached for the wall—and how that made perfect sense, ridiculously. Truly.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“The fireflies guide the way to the Park’s edge. They beam, and just before the darkness fills his bones, they beam for him again. He feels love then like it is a place. Is it not? It is. It is within him and also without. Thank God.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“I was never perfect. You just weren’t paying attention.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“There was what? is all Jane can manage. She wants him to repeat the words for content as much as emotion. She is not sure of what she feels exactly, the exact symptom or cause: a hollowness in her belly, tenderness not like love but like being socked in the throat.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“Her thoughts are like fireflies when you turn on the lights.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“remember you turned to me and said, Isn’t this something? Just being here? It is, I said. I remember, with you, the reel stopped running. Like: I am. You are. This is enough. Please stay.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“Just being with you feels like being chosen, winning a prize.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“I remember that whenever I left you it felt as if I’d moved away from a fire.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“They say it’s normal. I’ve stopped asking what’s normal, what’s not.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“For a moment, I forget the last year. For a moment, we are just waking up together. Life to live. Errands”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“Sometimes, when your eyes are closed, I cover my face. Sometimes, my greatest accomplishment in a day is to not wish desperately to go first.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“The difference between dialogue and conversation is that one you can take back.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“You sold three pieces without telling me. It was more money than you’d ever had. You remember being afraid of my response. It felt like celebrating failure.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“When you’re getting dressed, imagine he’s watching you. Showering. Eating cucumbers. Falling asleep. At a bookstore, he’s watching as you run your finger across the paperbacks on a low shelf and your hair is wild and wavy from rain. It makes everything lift.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“They were never a family per se. They were a triangle broken into lines. The one from him to his mother especially dashed. The one to his father intact, but faint.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“It was a house littered with eggshells.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“Jaclyn doesn’t call to thank him, but she does let him take her to the orchid show at the Brooklyn Botanical.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“He wants to ask her how she is but he knows better than to ask a question he will loathe the answer to. He wants to ask her if she’s forgiven him too. That’s really what he needs: a pass on all things.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story

“What she wouldn’t do to hold her mother’s slender fingers, chilled from the faucet. What she wouldn’t do to look her mother in the eyes one more time. To mouth, I love you. To draw for her. To rebuild her a world. What she wouldn’t do to be herself again too.”
― Jessica Soffer, This Is a Love Story