Perfect Match Quotes
"Change your point of view, and the perspective is completely different."
"Loose ends drive me crazy; I have to tidy things up."
"Every working mother has been caught between this Scylla and Charybdis."
"He smells of winter, a scent that comes to Maine at the same time local apples come to harvest."
"After years of seeing the world in absolutes, he has taught me how to pick out all the shades of possibility."
"Wouldn't it be nice to just get through a case without having to deal with all their baggage?"
"Sometimes what looks like a physical illness isn't."
"Sometimes these things can be about getting attention."
"I have seen it dozens of times, strong mothers who simply go to pieces."
"But Patrick doesn't even smile; for him the world is a place of rules."
"You cannot be doomed, after all, as long as you can still see the faint outline of hope on the opposite shore."
"No one but Caleb, that is, who will look at it a thousand times a day and know that at least one flawless memory of his son was saved."
"An item that looks perfectly normal on the surface might only be disguised."
"It means you're no longer a suspect, Mr. Frost."
"I give you a name and tell you what he did... and then you can go do your job?"
"I didn't keep my son safe. I didn't see it at all."
"You need to forgive yourself for not being aware of what was happening."
"But if I believe that Caleb is innocent, it means I don't believe Nathaniel."
"You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness."
"Life turns on a dime, and-it turns out-so does one's conscience."
"What goes missing is the affect; a curious flatness to voice and actions."
"This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood-finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without."
"In this storm of strangeness, Nathaniel is the one thing he can recognize."
"He has traveled every inch of this woman, he understands what makes her cry and what brings her to rapture; but he doesn't know her at all."
"You'd never know from that smooth brow what thoughts lay underneath the surface."
"Tonight, Nathaniel needs to be invincible. He needs to know that what happened to him could never, ever happen again."
"But they're supposed to be," Nathaniel explains, and Caleb understands.
"The next thing after love," she tells me, "is being a mom."
"Righteousness has less to do with a verdict than persuasion."
"You can't possibly walk away without poking it once, to see what it's made of inside."
"A superhero is nothing but an ordinary person who believes that she cannot fail."
"The world isn't black and white, but you never did learn that."
"Each time I do it, I think this may be the last time I hold his hand."
"Nina's single-mindedness has always been attractive-especially to a man who, in so many matters, is naturally hesitant."
"Once, Caleb had been hired to build a brick wall in a town park."
"Can you see it?" the man asked Caleb. "Can you see the hole where the poison's leaking?"
"It didn't matter there was no poisonous hole-just at that moment, Coalspot truly believed there was one."
"Nina is like that, now. She has redefined her actions so that they make sense to her, if not to anyone else."
"Caleb knows that Nina is looking for vindication, but he can't do what he did with Coalspot-look her in eye and tell her that yes, he understands."
"He wonders if the reason he's putting up a wall between them is so that, when she is sentenced, it is easier to let her go."
"As the ax comes down, the wood cleaves into two neat pieces, and sitting in the center is the truth."
"Here is what I have learned in a week: A prison, no matter what shape and size, is still a prison."
"Why is just taking time a waste of it?" Caleb asks, shrugging into another shirt.
""How? It was fine to start with!" He jams his shirt into the waist of his jeans, tightens his belt again."
"I have always believed there is a special place in Hell for the worst ones."
"Maybe there is a seed of malfeasance even in the most honest of people-like Patrick-that requires a certain combination of circumstances to bloom."
"You're the prime example of why we have laws in the first place."
""You knew," he says, his voice calm and that much more frightening for all its control."
"Nathaniel, though, is doing well. When he comes to the house, he is smiling."
"No matter what, there is always a footprint binding you to the ground."
"I killed a man for one reason and one reason only-to keep Nathaniel from being hurt any more."
"The problem with one of those is that you have to ruin it when you stand up."
"I don't want him to think about what happened to him ever again."
"Nathaniel, I need you to go sit in that chair."
"I ... I can't see anything," Nathaniel whispers.
"The last thing he wants to do is deal harshly with the boy."
"The man wants to hurt her. She must be just as scared of him as Nathaniel is."
"Maybe there is a God, then; maybe there are cosmic wheels of justice."
"But in the end, Nathaniel is exhausted from the events of the day."
"If you were a bird," she said, "I never would have let you fall out of the nest."
"Sometimes it's like that," his father had answered. Almost as soon as he said it, the two dragonflies hitched together like a shimmering space station, their wings beating like a quartet of hearts and their long tails quivering."
"But I love you," Caleb says, his voice breaking, because in a perfect world, this should be all the excuse one needs."
"It is not what you do with a child that brings you together ... it is the fact that you are lucky enough to do it at all."
"You don't understand ..." But then the bailiff unlocks the electronic bracelet on my wrist. It falls to the floor, ringing out my release."
"She laughs, and before I know it I am laughing back, which must mean I'm going to be okay after all."