The Best of Me Quotes

“‘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.’ He hesitated searching for the right words. ‘You might not understand, but I gave you the best of me, and after you left, nothing was ever the same.’”

“There’s a lot of magic between you, ain’t no denying that. And magic makes forgettin’ hard.”

“Everyone makes mistakes, even if some are worse than others. Accidents happen.”

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

“I gave you the best of me, he’d told her once, and with every beat of her son’s heart, she knew he’d done exactly that.”

“What the younger generation didn’t understand was that the grass was greenest where it’s watered, which meant that both Frank and Amanda had to get out their hoses if they wanted to make things better. But Amanda hadn’t asked.”

“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.”

“It was a myth that every mother and daughter were best friends, but friendship was far less important than family. Friends came and went; family was always there.”

“Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She’d believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn’t foresee or even understand, leaving a long trail of regret in its wake. And almost always, those regrets led to the kinds of what if questions that could never be answered.”

“‘He’ll drag you down, Amanda, but right now you’re too young to understand that.’”

“She understood then, with the distance that maturity brings, how much he’d loved her back then. And still did, something whispered inside her, and all at once she had the strange impression that everything they’d shared in the past had been the opening chapters in a book with a conclusion that had yet to be written.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as happy as I did that day, but then again, it was always like that when we were together. I never wanted it to end.”

“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.”

“That’s why I loved being with you. We could do the simplest things, like toss starfish into the ocean and share a burger and talk and even then I knew that I was fortunate. Because you were the first guy who wasn’t constantly trying to impress me. You accepted who you were, but more than that, you accepted me for me. And nothing else mattered-- not my family or your family or anyone else in the world. It was just us.”

“Change isn’t always for the best.”

“Were all first loves like that? Somehow she doubted it; even now it struck her as being more real than anything she’d ever known. Sometimes it saddened her to think that she’d never experience that kind of feeling again, but then life had a way of stamping out that intensity of passion; she’d learned all too well that love wasn’t always enough.”

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

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

″. . . 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.”

“You’re still alive. And that means you’ll love and be loved...and in the end, nothing else really matters.”

“Now it was coming to an end, and it was like he was watching the last flicker of light wink out in the darkness of an endless tunnel.”

“Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She’d believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life”