When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

Objection!” Metz shouts.Grounds?” the judge asks.Well…he’s my witness!

When you love someone – when you create a child with him – you don’t just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can’t be destroyed, just channeled into something else.

If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

Eric understands that the world is rarelythe way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don’t have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do...

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

You can’t hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

There’s a problem with wounded birds, Cassie,” Connor said. “Either they fly away from you one day, or else they never get better. They stay hurt no matter what you do.

There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots s there are in the bright ones.

…when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.

Stupid English.””English isn’t stupid,” I say.”Well, my English teacher is.” He makes a face. “Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won’t let me.””Why...

When I first met Cara, she was twelve and angry at the world. Her parents had split up, her brother was gone, and her mom was infatuated with some guy who was missing vowels in...

Polar north can’t get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what.

At the very bottom of hell, there’s no fire, no brimstone, just the utter inability to take action…Is taking away your ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want, the very worst punishment you...

Someone real,” I hear myself saying. “Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who’s smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to...

You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he’s really just hoping he makes it all the way...

well, sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her...

Scars are just a treasure map for pain you’ve buried too deep to remember.

It’s not politically correct to say that you love one child more than you love your others. I love all of my kids, period, and they’re all your favorites in different ways. But ask any...

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else’s thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away...

Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.

I’m too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live

I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

That the sum of a man’s life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes.I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my...

I learn from my own daughter that you don’t have to be awake to cry.

Betrayal was a stone beneath the mattress of the bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep...

Here’s a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we’d rather curl up with...

If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.

Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.

be a good listener, don’t judge and don’t put boundaries on someone else’s grief.

No matter what Joe Hoffman and Wade Preston say, it’s not gender that makes a family; it’s love. You don’t need a mother and a father; you don’t necessarily even need two parents. You just...

words are like nets – we hope they’ll cover what we mean, but we know they can’t possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.

Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength – and the honesty – to break them down.

The cost of growth is always a small act of violence.

Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles–they kept reality from paralyzing you

On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger’s. Like me, they’re very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.

Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn’t even know existed.

I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the’re hiding.

Parents aren’t the people you come from. They’re the people you want to be, when you grow up.

I drew it over my skin like a violins bow, No one would ever hear the song of my shame.

Could you really love someone who was capable of falling in love with someone else?

When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it’s safe inside your mouth.

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn’t all about me?

Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

She’d been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. ‘You are so beautiful,’ her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders.’You are so full of shit,’ Lila snarled,...

It was a strange thing, to still be in love with your wife and to not know if you liked her. What would happen when this was all over? Could you forgive someone if she...

Good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.

You can believe something really hard,’ Faith says, ‘and still be wrong.