An oncology ward is a battlefield, and there are definite hierarchies of command. The patients, they’re the ones doing the tour of duty. The doctors breeze in and out like conquering heroes, but they need...

Edward: You know what the difference is between a dream and a goal? he used to say to me. A plan.

Home is not a place, but rather, the people who love you.

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

[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,...

but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems...

If you didn’t remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn’t?

Was that all it took to be brave? Knowing that someone believed in you?

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...

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...

…courage wasn’t something you were bequeathed at birth, and it wasn’t a lack of fright. It was overcoming your fear, because the ones you love mattered more.

You would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don’t need anyone else. I need you, she replied.Well, I said. Maybe I’ll come back as catnip.

If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

Oh, darling, that’s what love is. It’s some power greater than you and me, that draws us to one special person.

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn’t yours. But grief comes from losing something you’ve already had.

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

An item that looks perfectly normal on the surface might only be disguised.

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...

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...

The thing that most people didn’t understand, if they weren’t in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that...

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

There are all sorts of losses people suffer- from the small to the large. You can lose your car keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you...

Cara: I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn’t mean you’re fearless....

Isn’t that what true romance is supposed 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...

Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.

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...

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...

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