She’s not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting.

God, don’t they teach you how to spell these days?””No,” I answer. “They teach us to use spell-check.

It’s the child who’s supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front...

I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don’t understand how I’m going to get from here to there.

Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn’t even any guilt.

I don’t know. But I do know that I’m at the stage of my life where I want forever, not right now.I know that the first person I kissed won’t be nearly as important as...

There was a fine line between love and hate, you heard that cliche all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You’d...

My mother… she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.

Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damagers awards.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character… Change isn’t always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people...

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had...

Can’t you believe in me, if I believe in you?

Where you come from does matter — but not nearly as much as where you are headed.

You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

A woman isn’t all that different from a bonfire. A fire’s a beautiful thing, right? Something you can’t take your eyes off, when it’s burning. If you can keep it contained, it’ll throw light and...

I can give or take elephants; I never can find the cheetah-but the zebras captivate me. They’d be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a...

I don’t know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You’d be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused.

I have a sister, so I know-that relationship, it’s all about fairness: you want your sibling to have exactly what you have-the same amount of toys, the same number of meatballs on your spaghetti, the...

They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don’t realize I am one of them.

Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?

You have to create characters who will whisk people away from their ordinary lives.

How could he convey to someone who’d never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its...

The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn’t had time to do.

There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

She knows the truth can cause a sharp pain behind your eyes and that love sometimes feels like a fist around your throat.

Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees.

I told myself that if I didn’t care, this wouldn’t have hurt so much – surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that...

Isn’t that what true romance issupposed to be about? Finding the person who’s your soul mate. Someone you dream about at night. Someone whose name is on your lips when you wake up in the...

The best parenting advice I ever got was from a labor nurse who told me the following:1. After your baby gets here, the dog will just be a dog.2. The terrible twos last through age...

And just like that, something inside shifted very subtly, so that all the empty spaces in him suddenly disappeared, so that his breath timed to hers, so that his blood sang. This is why there...

What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up...

How do you walk into someone’s life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.

Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the...

People believe in God because they don’t have any other explanation for things that happen.

You’d think someone who’d been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside.

Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it’s there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.

Wenn jemand starb, dem du dein Herz geschenkt hattest, nahm er es dann mit?

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you’ll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone’s...

Then Henry speaks again. “Did he do it?”I turn to him slowly. “Does it matter?

Quem diria que as palavras que nunca chegamos a dizer assentassem tão pesadamente?

I learned a long time ago with you that folks who were trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and...

You can make it dark, but I can’t make it light.

Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.

You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.