An oncology ward is a battlefield, and there are definite hierarchies of command. The patients, they’re the ones doing the tour of duty. The doctors breeze in and out like conquering heroes, but they need...

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a...

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn’t yours. But grief comes from losing something you’ve already had.

Since when does anyone get the option to do the easiest?

Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max’s hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It’s a...

You didn’t get past something like that, you go through it — and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.

[I] don’t think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.

For God’s sake, if I learned anything during this damn trial it’s that the only way someone can leave you is if you let them. And I’m not doing that, Dee. It may look like...

But if you seek forgiveness, doesn’t that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn’t that desperation make you human again?

(24/7) once you sign on to be a mother, that’s the only shift they offer.

She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden...

Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air....

The apple . . . came before Adam and Eve in the story of creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that’s how long it takes for a new tree...

You’ll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you’re still the one in control.

Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn’t even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn’t yet been slammed in your face.

DO you think it hurts to die?” Not as much as it hurts to live, Trixie thought.

If you didn’t remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn’t?

Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.

I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that’s exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.

…courage wasn’t something you were bequeathed at birth, and it wasn’t a lack of fright. It was overcoming your fear, because the ones you love mattered more.

There are all sorts of losses people suffer- from the small to the large. You can lose your car keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you...

Suffering so someone else didn’t have to suffer. Sacrificing your body for someone else’s well being.

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

if you tell yourself you feel fine, you will.

When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, youhave plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that...

Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow...

I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up...

You can miss a person you’ve never known.

It’s crazy, right? To love someone who’s hurt you? It’s crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you.

and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn’t live for very long without...

If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest–like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the...

Hope is what makes you look outside the window to see if it’s stopped raining. Hope is what makes you believe he’ll text you back. Hope is why you buy your jeans a little tight…...

When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you’ve worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by heart...

so familiar that you slide back to the place where you fit.

My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn’t: my past.

You know how I get angry sometimes? That’s because it’s the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I’m really here.

It still hurts,” she whispered. “Even when you’re doing it for someone else, that doesn’t stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.

If you want to know someone’s story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It’s new, even to me.

I …understand how a parent might hit a child- it’s because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn’t.

You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.

Neither of us, it turns out, has been the only one who lost someone she loved.

You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed – the length of a sleeping baby’s eyelash, the span of a child’s hand. Life turns on a dime, and –...

I think libraries are an important part of the community. If it wasn’t for librarians recommending our books to people coming into the library unsure of what to read, where would authors be? I really...

What if love wasn’t the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood...