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.

…one half leaning in, one half pulling away.

I know you love me. The question is, how much?

She wondered how many hours it had been since she’d talked out loud. If you didn’t use your voice, ever, would it eventually shrivel up and dry away? Was there a natural selection involved in...

When you love someone you let them take care of you.

When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires

A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and...

The Lord turned water into wine. All I’m suggesting is a trip to the grocery store.

Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can’t stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can’t see clearly?

Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don’t want their kids… but when you look more closely, you realize that they’re doing those kids a favor. They’re just trying to give them...

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it … some stories just don’t have a happy ending.

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night–because morals are...

Most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. To be honest, I don’t blame them. It’s superstition: If you give assistance to the family in need… if you...

When you’re pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to...

When you have been burned by fire once, you don’t leap into the flames again.

But no one ever said yes to make sex consensual. You took hints from body language, from the way two people came together. Why…didn’t a shake of the head or a hand pushing hard against...

They were at different places in the same relationship and like anything that’s out of alighment, they were destined to crash sooner or later.

How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?

Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive...

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

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn’t be the cost of failure for a good friend.

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

Logically, I understand that it wasn’t Edward’s fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you’re eleven years old, you don’t give a flip about logic. You just really miss holding your big...

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you’ve got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won’t be able...

When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.

We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents – the question is, how much?

You know how sometimes, your life is so perfect you’re afraid for the next moment, because it couldn’t possibly be quite as good? That’s what it felt like.

There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each...

Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed–sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which...

In my previous life I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be- but that was before I’d been handed a fistful of crushed violets from...

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask… with...

In the wake of a disaster, the last thing you needed to do was set off another bomb; instead, you walked through the rubble and told yourself that it wasn’t nearly as bad as it...

You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.

You don’t have to say I love you to say I love you,” you said with a shrug. “All you have to do is say my name and I know.”…”Can’t you hear it?” you said....

The thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart...

I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father,” she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don’t you think?

She didn’t like it when religious folks looked down on her for being an atheist; but to be honest, I didn’t see how this was any different from the way she looked down on people...

You want to know what I want? I’m sick of being a guinea pig. I’m sick, but I’m never f*cking sick enough for this family.

The English judged a person so that they’d be justified in casting her out. The Amish judged a person so that they’d be justified in welcoming her back. Where I’m from, if someone is accused...

You know, that was what we missed most. Not our beds, not our homes, not even our mothers. We would talk about food.

The ability to find sparks may be buried so deep in you that you stop believing there’s a God. Until someone comes along, with so much light in her that you can’t help but see...