Quotes from Elin Hilderbrand

Harper prefers winter, when it gets dark at three thirty and is pitch black by the time she finishes her shift. The summer sun reveals too much.

She had spent much of the previous six months hating Mick for what had happened with Brigid—but hate was not the opposite of love. Indifference was the opposite of love, and for the first time, Ayers felt like she could take Mick or leave him. Tonight, she would leave him.

Telling the truth when you've done something wrong is the most terrifying thing in the world.

However, deep down, Brenda suspected that it was the stolen nature of those two hours that transformed them. She was supposed to be somewhere else... She had set aside those two hours - three, if you counted the driving - to be of service to her sister. The fact that Vicki had unexpectedly granted her leave gave those two hours a rarefied quality. What Brenda had thought was, I'd better not waste them. And, like magic, the words had come. The pages had filled.

I love you in a way that is so powerful it lifts me up, it propels me forward. You propel me forward.

You know what the happiest summer of my life was?" Kate asks. 'When you turned 13?' Jessie guesses. "I was 13 during the Great Depression, so no.

Did two good people do something they knew was wrong because there was some kind of magical chemistry involved? Or was it plain old human fallibility, weakness in the face of temptation?

Camus quote: In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

Summer does something to the brain, " Beth said. "It's intoxicating. Everything shimmers

She still loves him but she doesn't trust him and she doesn't trust herself, and sometimes she thinks she went back to him only because it was comfortable and familiar

She isn't…substantial enough. She is a line drawing of a woman that has been only partially colored in.

The greatest risk there is. The risk of parenthood. You're a mother.

Or a T-shirt that says Cash Me Outside How Bah Dat.

Love is messy and complicated and unfair.

Kelley becomes addicted to the novels of Danielle Steel. Now, there's a woman who knows about life: dying billionaires who cut their obnoxious children out of the will, unappreciated housewives who fall into the arms of the children's sailing instructor. And Ms. Steel writes one heck of a sex scene.

Lust is great in the bedroom, but Like is better at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

There is nothing more mysterious, confounding, and unknowable, than the desires of the human heart.

It had been the quintessential autumn night, cool but not yet cold, the air smelling of wood smoke and leaves.

Joe was making the mustard in a twelve-quart stockpot. Adrienne watched him for a minute, in awe of the sheer volume of ingredients: a pound of dry mustard, five cups of vinegar, eight cups of sugar, a whole pound of butter, and a dozen eggs. Joe added sixteen grinds of white pepper from a pepper mill that was longer than his arm.

Agnes like she was a baby bird. Dabney felt a combination of

One is never too young for fine literature . . .

Adrienne snatched an hors d'oeuvre from a passing tray. She had eaten a sausage grinder for family meal but this food was too gorgeous to pass up. She stopped at the buffet table and dipped a crab claw in a lemony mayonnaise. Her champagne was icee cold; it was crisp, like an apple. Across the tent, she saw Darla Parrish and her sister Eleanor standing in front of a table where a man was slicing gravlax.

He was too busy attacking the buffet table- tenderloin, crab claws, gravlax, mushrooms, cherrystones on the half shell. He held one out to Adrienne. "Eat this," he said. "No, thanks." "Come on." "I'm not hungry." "Not hungry?" he said. He piled his plate with Chinese spare ribs. "This food is incredible.

While Mallory fixes the appetizers, Jake goes for a swim