But even if every house looked identical-if all the furnishings were the same- it still wouldn’t feel like yours.That’s because home isn’t where you are. It’s who you’re with.

Forgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying, ‘You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.’ It’s saying, ‘You don’t get to trap me in...

You figured that the only way I’d be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.

Sometimes there aren’t words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.

Choices are funny things-ask a native tribe that’s eaten grubs and roots forever if they’re unhappy, and they’ll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to...

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I’ve decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

The thing about a mom is that she’s always there. She’s the one who rubs your back when you have the flu, who manages to notice you have no clean underwear and does your wash...

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn’t know what was at stake to lose, you...

i don’t know. i don’t care. all i know is when you pay for something that’s supposed to give you a cup of coffee, you deserve to get your fucking cup of coffee.

There are skeletons in everyone’s closet, things no one ever wants the world to discover.

Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones. You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover-up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing...

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

If you’re afraid of everyone leaving you, what do you do?”Make them stay.”And if you can’t do that, or don’t know how to?”Ellie shrugged. “I don’t know.”Yes, you do. In fact, you’ve done it. You...

When it rains,” her father said “it pours.

I am not a religious man. I have not attended a service for many years. But I do believe in God. My own practice of religion, you could say, it a nonpractice. I personally feel...

every now and then, i worry about people in the third world countries. and then i figure if they all started having sex, their lives would be considerably brighter.

It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you’d been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was...

Prayer is like water – something you can’t imagine has the strength or power to do any good, and yet give it time and it can change the lay of the land.

I like the word ‘evil’. Scramble it a little and you will get ‘vile’ and ‘live’. ‘Good’, on the other hand, is just a command to ‘go do’.

This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone…a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might...

I want to believe there’s a God. Because I sure as hell know there’s a devil.

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.

Here’s my question: What age are you when you’re in Heaven?

When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.

I think there are two different oceans – the one that plays with you in the summer, and the one that gets so mad in the winter.

It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.

Part of our job as a writer is to consider how we tell stories, … This is one way of looking at multiple versions of storytelling. What is also fun about it is all fiction...

Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can’t] save a single person.

There are so many things I can’t believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I’ll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead...

When I’m with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that’s backing up.

People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don’t, how will they ever come to appreciate safety.

[There’s a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It’s silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama,...

What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind – a trail made of stripped off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia – and...

I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn’t get past something like that, you got through it.

What I mean is that those thoughts, they’re human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone’s imagined you would doesn’t mean that you’ve failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in...

The first Abenaki word I ever learned was Bitawbagok – the word they use for Lake Champlain. It means, literally, the waters between. Since I’ve come back from Quebec, I have thought of my address...

At that moment, Oliver realized that home is not a place, but rather, the people who love you.

They don’t like the thought of someone else making demands on the person whom they see as belonging entirely to them.

When they laugh, it sounds like confetti.

Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I’m wearing will never really fit.

she didn’t need anyone. At Wheeler, even when she stood out with her pink hair and quilter army-surplus jacket and combat bots, she did this without apology. It was a great irony that the very...

The catch was this: Power always involved a loss of humanity.

I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I’m pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. […] The thing is, they’re both...

She puts her hands on either side of my face, and the room falls away. I have never gotten so lost in a kiss before. And then, the space between us explodes. My heart keeps...

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.

Dylan Jerome,” the lawyer admits, “wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him.

Every life has a soundtrack.There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There’s another that reminds me of...

I’d do it all over again.

In the space between yes and no, there is a lifetime. It’s the difference between the path you walk and one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you thought you could be and...

In the past, even Alex’s promises hadn’t prevented a reoccurence. She didn’t have a choice. She wished he could see that as clearly as she did.