But sometimes, in order to win, you have to make sacrifices.

Maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.

Maybe a mother wasn’t what she seemed to be on the surface.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you...

When you read the art,

I love you,” he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs...

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you’d been before the fall.

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

I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.

Change isn’t always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation., and to others, like a pearl.

Sometimes parents don’t find what they’re looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they’d like to grow there instead. I’ve witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son...

You always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were.

I don’t understand why people never say what they mean. It’s like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn’t...

You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it’s a catch-22: all of those things that you’re willing to lose are...

You will ask me, after this, why, I didn’t tell you this before. It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a...

His grandmother had taught him that there was no such thing as coincidence. There are millions of people in this world, she had told him, and the spirits will see that most of them, you...

Chase every rung of possibility, and you still get absolutely nowhere.

There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken...

Nowadays, I dont have expectations, and this way she beats them all.

You are seeing his comic book about a girl who is in Hell and her father who goes to Hell to bring her back,

I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.

She shrugged. “You can be happy for someone else’s good fortune, but that doesn’t mean you forget your own bad luck.

Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation – expectation divided by reality – you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you...

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone. It feels less like a wound and more like a poultice.

It’s never the differences between people that surprise us. It’s the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

Even if we have grown so far apart that we don’t recognize each other when we pass, we have this life, this block of time, and what do you think about that?

How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys....

Sometimes we don’t know we’re dreaming; we can’t even fathom that we’re asleep.

If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve...

I think we deserve a happily-ever-after.””If anyone ever did, it’s us.

There is a magic to intimacy, a world built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger than iron. There is only you, and him, so impossibly close that nothing can come between....

If you think about someone you’ve loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.

That’s not the real question, Oliver. What you should be asking is, Can you live without her?

Skin color doesn’t make you different,’ Melody said. ‘We’re all the same on the inside.’ ‘The only people who ever say that,’ Raymon replied, ‘are white.

When heaven breaks, who fixes it?

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?

Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.

I pointed to the wound. “It’s missing,” I said.My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. “Yes,” she said. “But see how...

A sacrament–like marriage–means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you’re modeling God. And God never gives up.

You know, Sage, Jesus didn’t tell us to forgive everyone. He said turn the other cheek, but only if you the one who was hit. Even the Lord’s Prayer says it loud and clear: Forgive...

Turn around, and the people you thought you knew might change. Your little boy might now live half a world away. Your beautiful daughter might be sneaking out at night. Your ex-husband might by dying...

History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?’ She shakes her head. ‘All of that, and the world didn’t learn anything. Look around....

If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over- only living with the mistakes you’ve made.

Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.

Is his work vengeance? Or Justice? There is the finest line between the two and when i try to focus on it, it becomes less and less clear.

Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you’re young. But I don’t think we make any fewer when we’re grown up

My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.

Real mothers don’t just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the...

if you were quiet and blended into the background, you were less likely to make waves