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...

You know someone’s right for you when the things they don’t have to say are even more important than the things they do.

A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.

Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy’s dying wish?

Edward: You know what the difference is between a dream and a goal? he used to say to me. A plan.

Memories aren’t stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

Was that all it took to be brave? Knowing that someone believed in you?

She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else – with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James....

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

Something still exists as long as there’s someone still around to remember it.

You can argue that it’s a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It’s the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac...

You have to understand – there is a romance to Africa. You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God. You watch the slow lope of a lioness and forget...

I love the idea that a name might change based on who you are at a given moment in time. Lia

Maybe mothers – consciously or subconsciously – repelled their daughters in different ways.

Being a parent wasn’t just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

Change is a funny thing. We never are quite sure what we are becoming or even why. Then one day we look at ourselves and wonder who we are and how we got that way....

I’m lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one....

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.

But love wasn’t about sacrifice, and it wasn’t about falling short of someone’s expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All...

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital… Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you’ve woven, you’ll never get rid of the stain.

It’s never fifty-fifty in a marriage. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works hard to keep things rolling smoothly, someone else sails along for the ride. Someone...

There are so many ways a family can unravel. All it takes is a tiny slash of selfishness, a rip of greed, a puncture of bad luck. And yet, woven tightly, family can be the...

The only monsters I have ever known were men.

by now you’ve already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person’s past has nothing to do with his future. you...

And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the...

I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I’d hurt Rob. Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and...

but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems...

The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we’re supposed to.

How can you ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom

Listen, I would say, this is not how I thought our lives would go; and may be we cannot find our way out of this alley. But there is no one I’d rather be lost...

Peter curled his hands into fists at his sides. ‘Kiss me,’ he said.She leaned towards him slowly, until her face was too close to be in focus. Her hair fell over Peter’s shoulder like a...

It was that she truly believed you could be fourteen when you learned how love could change the speed your blood ran through you, how it made you dream in kaleidosocope color.

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.