You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.
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?
I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.
and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn’t live for very long without a heart.
The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.
When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it’s safe inside your mouth.
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.
When you love someone you let them take care of you.
Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.
Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.
I don’t think we get a choice in who we fall for,” Ian whispers. “I think we just do.
So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.
People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.
What if love wasn’t the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?
How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?
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.
He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again – the year I realize that love doesn’t follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable
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.
My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn’t a social construct but an instinct.
The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we’re supposed to.
All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else’s life would not have been as rich without us here.
If you didn’t remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn’t?
What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.
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.
Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.
Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect – I guess that’s where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who’s there to remind you what you learned along the way.
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.
Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn’t yours. But grief comes from losing something you’ve already had.
This is love, I think. A place where people who have been alone may lock together like hawks and spin in the air, dizzy with surprise at the connection. A place you go willingly, and with wonder
You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he’s really just hoping he makes it all the way across?
if i’m going to fuck up my life, does it really matter which way i do it?.
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.
The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they’d lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.
She shrugged. “You can be happy for someone else’s good fortune, but that doesn’t mean you forget your own bad luck.
A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it
Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.
You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.
If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.
Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.
Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.
And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.
Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.
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
The truth doesn’t always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies
Just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it’s any less true.
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.
When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.
Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.
It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.
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 you get lemon zest instead.
But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.
When you think you’re right, you’re most likely wrong.
Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.
Since when does anyone get the option to do the easiest?
No, honestly, my mouth shouldn’t be able to function unless my brain’s engaged.
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?
A sacrament–like marriage–means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you’re modeling God. And God never gives up.
Dr. Keller begins pacing. “I don’t think we’ve been hearing Faith just right. Her guard…the words..they sound alike.”What do you mean?”Your daughter,” Dr. Keller says flatly. “I think she’s seeing God.
Dylan Jerome,” the lawyer admits, “wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him.
well, sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.
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. It just means you fear different things.
There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.
There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations
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 got, Lewis realized, was hope.
If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can’t someone be healed by happiness?
When I’m with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that’s backing up.
But there’s a part of me that wonders what it would be like to be the most important person to someone else, to always feel like you were missing a piece of yourself when he wasn’t near you.
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 morning.
I realize that I quite like this girl. It’s not just that she’s so pretty the words fly out of my mind before they can leave my mouth—it’s that when we’re chatting, I feel like I’ve known her all my life.
It felt like I’d been living underground, and for a moment, I’d been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you’ve seen that, how can you go back where you came from?
Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital… Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you’ve woven, you’ll never get rid of the stain.
If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?
Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy’s dying wish?
The scariest thing in the world is thinking someone you love is going to die.
Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.
I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.
Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.
They go on to this better place, you know, which is what they wanted all along. But you and me, we’re still left behind with all the questions they couldn’t answer.
Wenn jemand starb, dem du dein Herz geschenkt hattest, nahm er es dann mit?
You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place–because we become better people in it.
I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.
I lean against my sister’s shoulder. “I thought lightning wasn’t supposed to strike in the same place twice.””Sure it does,” Izzy tells me. “But only if you’re too dumb to move.
males conspicuously leaving their mark to let others know where they weren’t welcome.
because in the past words have only driven them apart.
We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that’s exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.
The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story
be a good listener, don’t judge and don’t put boundaries on someone else’s grief.
Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.
And if you don’t find what you’re looking for?”At Roy’s question Addie looked up.”Then all I’ve lost is time.
Objection!” Metz shouts.Grounds?” the judge asks.Well…he’s my witness!
Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damagers awards.
The Lord turned water into wine. All I’m suggesting is a trip to the grocery store.
A robber? In the trash bins? Honestly, Wes. This is Salem Falls, not the set of Law and Order.
You’d be surprised.” Charlie said.”You go to bed one night singing her a lullaby, and she wakes up listening to Limp Bizkit.””What the hell is Limp Bizkit?
If I tell you another seven hundred times, maybe one of these days you might turn your clothes right side out when you put them in the hamper, eh?
I’ve got a Don Baylor,” J.T. said.”California sucks this year.”Ralph snickered. “I wouldn’t use a Baylor card to scrape dog shit off the street.
So what do you think the physical effect was?”Roman Laughed. “Buddy,” he said, “she was tripping.
This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.
Although you hadn’t asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.
He kissed her so gently she wondered if she had imagined it
A real friend isn’t capable of feeling sorry for you.
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.
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.
It’s never the differences between people that surprise us. It’s the things that, against all odds, we have in common.
Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we’ve wounded the people we are trying to protect.
I wondered about the explorers who’d sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.
Edward: You know what the difference is between a dream and a goal? he used to say to me. A plan.
Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers.
Go fuck yourself Judge.””Motion denied.” answers the judge dryly.
Some women are meant to change the world, while others are meant to hold it together. And then there are those of us who simply don’t want to be in it, because we know no matter how much we struggle, we can’t comfortably fit.
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?
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.
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.
There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character.
Every baby is born beautiful. It’s what we project on them that makes them ugly.
Memories aren’t stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.
Taking a deep breath, I shake my head and find Judge staring at me. “Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans,” I say. “Once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers.
History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them.
I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.
Scars are just a treasure map for pain you’ve buried too deep to remember.
You didn’t get past something like that, you go through it — and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.
There are kinds of pain that you can’t speak out loud.
Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting.
She sobbed the way she did everything else- with passion and excess.
When you love someone – when you create a child with him – you don’t just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can’t be destroyed, just channeled into something else.
So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I’d forgotten to communicate?
The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.
I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.
To find out a heart she’d believed irrevocably broken had somewhere along the way been fixed.
What she really meant was: here is my heart, have a care.
Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.
If you live in each other’s pockets long enough, you’re related.
No matter what Joe Hoffman and Wade Preston say, it’s not gender that makes a family; it’s love. You don’t need a mother and a father; you don’t necessarily even need two parents. You just need someone who’s got your back.
Then Henry speaks again. “Did he do it?”I turn to him slowly. “Does it matter?
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.
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.
Eric understands that the world is rarely the way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don’t have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.
Was that all it took to be brave? Knowing that someone believed in you?
…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.
If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
I wonder how much the general population of this country know that the legal system has far more to do with playing a good hand of poker than it does with justice.
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.
words are like nets – we hope they’ll cover what we mean, but we know they can’t possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.
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 a better life.
Babies don’t come with instruction booklets. You’d learn the same way we all do — you’d read up on dinosaurs, you’d Google backhoes and skidders. And you don’t need a penis to go buy a baseball glove.
[I] don’t think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.
I used to think I’d be just like them when I grew up, but I am not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway.
Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees.
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 brother’s hand.
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?
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 who hands back each of these when its needed?
Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength – and the honesty – to break them down.
It is a curious thing, watching a strong man fall to pieces.
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.
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.
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 the past. I am worthy of a future.
A very wise man once told me that you can’t look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.
You can believe something really hard,’ Faith says, ‘and still be wrong.
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 for being Christians.
I sigh. “But if you’d talked to Jules—if she could hear you . . .” My voice trails off.“Then you wouldn’t feel quite so crazy?” Oliver asks gently. “Can’t you believe in me, if I believe in you?
People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.
You don’t have to say I love you to say I love you.
The only difference between a wish and a prayer is that you’re at the mercy of the universe for the first, and you’ve got some help with the second.
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.
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.
It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else’s. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party – a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.
To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her.
You figured that the only way I’d be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.
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.
What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you’d never forget?
But if you seek forgiveness, doesn’t that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn’t that desperation make you human again?
In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.
I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn’t get past something like that, you got through it.
Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?
Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.
He gently touched his mother’s cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.
Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value.
If you think about someone you’ve loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.
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 had nothing to fight for.
When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.
But that’s what love is, isn’t it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?
How can you ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom
You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.
What I think is that there is no perspective in grief, or in love. How can there be, when one person becomes the center of the universe – either because he has been lost or because he has been found?
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 to cry for real when you need to.
I [Jacob Hunt, Aspie] see it as the next step of evolution: I cannot take away your sadness, so why should I acknowledge it?
You always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were.
Men. You can’t live with them…and you can’t legally shoot them. I tossed out my husband eight years ago and got a llama instead. Best decision I ever made.
My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.
When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.
Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.
Where you come from does matter — but not nearly as much as where you are headed.
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.
The cost of growth is always a small act of violence.
When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn’t.
I don’t know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.
In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn’t: my past.
Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.
I don’t understand why it’s a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.
Suffering so someone else didn’t have to suffer. Sacrificing your body for someone else’s well being.
I’m too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live
She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.
I can’t do this to you,’ he said, drawing back. Emily put her hand on his and pulled the gun to her temple. ‘Then do it for me,’ she said.
I just completed The Tenth Circle. It is an excellent mystery story surrounding a family with modern day issues.
And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the same as you’d been before the fall
You know how I get angry sometimes? That’s because it’s the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I’m really here.
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.
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 morning.
From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest.Darkness, you know, is relative.
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’.
If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?
I want to believe there’s a God. Because I sure as hell know there’s a devil.
The feeling that she was going to explode, that she was too big for her own skin.
It’s not because I don’t want to hurt Delia’s feelings. It’s because when she is bruised, I’m the one who aches.
You can’t hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.
As Lacy waited for her turn to speak on Peter’s behalf, she thought back to the first time she realized she could hate her own child.
You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.
She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.
When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.
Something still exists as long as there’s someone still around to remember it.
For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.
Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles–they kept reality from paralyzing you
She’s not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting.
What you didn’t tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.
(24/7) once you sign on to be a mother, that’s the only shift they offer.
I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.
Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.
We’re [parents]) always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we’re just praying we won’t screw up too badly.
We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents – the question is, how much?
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 it.
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?
You know, that was what we missed most. Not our beds, not our homes, not even our mothers. We would talk about food.
Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.
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.
I realized it was like looking into the sun—you shouldn’t do it, because you’d turn your face away and be blind to everything else.
Campbell” Julia says “Don’t do this to me””Do what?””Push me off the same cliff twice
Do you know what it’s like to give your whole self to a person, and your whole heart to boot, until you’ve got nothing left to give- and then realize that it still isn’t whay they need?
If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.
A trial, it often came down to who had the best story.
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.
Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and may be never really had.
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.
I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I’d hurt Rob. Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we’ve wounded the people we’re trying to protect.
It still hurts,” she whispered. “Even when you’re doing it for someone else, that doesn’t stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.
There’s a problem with wounded birds, Cassie,” Connor said. “Either they fly away from you one day, or else they never get better. They stay hurt no matter what you do.
It turned out people truly did cry into their coffee cups.
Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he’d promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again.
There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.
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 Native Americans know that wolves are mirrors for humans. What they show us are our strengths and weaknesses… When I lived with the wolves, I was proud of the reflection of myself. But when I came back, I always paled in comparison.
Home is not a place, but rather, the people who love you.
At that moment, Oliver realized that home is not a place, but rather, the people who love you.
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.
I think we deserve a happily-ever-after.””If anyone ever did, it’s us.
Pick ten strangers and stick them in a room, and ask them which of us they feel sorrier for – you or me – and we all know who they’ll choose.
So you know what mean when I say that I don’t think anyone who falls in love has a choice. You’re just pulled to that person like true north, whether it’s good for you or bound to break your heart.
There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots s there are in the bright ones.
If you want to know someone’s story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It’s new, even to me.
If you end your story, it’s a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don’t, it belongs to anyone’s imagination. It stays alive forever.
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 arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.
You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.
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 in the stars.
Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas–a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak.
God, don’t they teach you how to spell these days?””No,” I answer. “They teach us to use spell-check.
Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed
true love is felonious… You take someone’s breath away… You rob them of the ability to utter a single word… You steal a heart.
I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.
But sometimes, in order to win, you have to make sacrifices.
You may think there’s nothing very interesting about seeing someone sleep, but that probably means you’ve never found the girl of your dreams.
A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when it’s ready.
True confession: The reason we don’t talk about race is because we do not speak a common language.
My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.
It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.
It’s about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.
Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you’re young. But I don’t think we make any fewer when we’re grown up
Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I’ve decided, is only a slow sewing shut.
Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest – learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.
Maybe a mother wasn’t what she seemed to be on the surface.
She is not the child that mirrors me, and yet when you put us side by side, there are definite similarities. It’s not in the shape of the mouth but the set of it, the sheer determination that silvers our eyes.
You’ll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you’re still the one in control.
Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed.
There was no black or white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. People were just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.
They don’t like the thought of someone else making demands on the person whom they see as belonging entirely to them.
Listen, I would say, this is not how I thought our lives would go; and may be we cannot find our way out of this alley. But there is no one I’d rather be lost with.
Neither of us, it turns out, has been the only one who lost someone she loved.
Listen, I would say, this is not how I thought our lives would go; and maybe we cannot find our way out of this alley. But there is no one I’d rather be lost with.
Parents aren’t the people you come from. They’re the people you want to be, when you grow up.
if you were quiet and blended into the background, you were less likely to make waves
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.
Here’s what I hadn’t realized: the mother you haven’t seen for almost thirty-six years isn’t your mother, she’s a stranger. Sharing DNA doesn’t make you fast friends. This wasn’t a joyous reunion. It was just awkward.
Maybe mothers – consciously or subconsciously – repelled their daughters in different ways.
Being a mother gives you a singular sort of vision, a prism through which you can see your child with many different faces all at once. It is the reason you can watch him shatter a ceramic lamp, and still remember him as an angel.
When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.
Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.
You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
I learn from my own daughter that you don’t have to be awake to cry.
When you have been burned by fire once, you don’t leap into the flames again.
On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger’s. Like me, they’re very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.
Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn’t even any guilt.
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.
Skin color doesn’t make you different,” Melody said. “We’re all the same on the inside.”The only people who ever say that,” Raymond replied, “are white.
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.
All it takes is a second and your whole life can get turned upside down.
My mother used to say that sometimes if you turn a tragedy over in your hand, you can see a miracle running through it, like fool’s gold in the hardest shard of rock.
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 nothing beneath it?
Nowadays, I dont have expectations, and this way she beats them all.
Is there any place on earth that smells better than a Laundromat? It’s like a rainy Sunday when you don’t have to get out from under your covers, or like lying back on the grass your father’s just mowed–comfort food for your nose.
People believe in God because they don’t have any other explanation for things that happen.
I love the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying—like the sun striking th cheek of a tomato, or soap drying in the hood of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine. I loved.
What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline cracks.
McAfee, I could try this case in my sleep and still win.””Guess that’s your plan, then, since you’re clearly dreaming.
They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don’t realize I am one of them.
When you’re a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.
Being a parent wasn’t just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.
I used to sit in front of my father’s Jag, watching the raindrops run their kamikaze suicide missions from one edge of the windshield to the wiper blade.
Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn’t even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.
Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.
Sometimes knowing what’s right isn’t a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.
It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.
When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a tod
I drew it over my skin like a violins bow, No one would ever hear the song of my shame.
We all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn’t have any.
The only thing they’ll let you shoot with a camera.
That’s the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself.
If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?
You can’t look back – you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.
…when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.
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 were before it happened.
When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, youhave plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw.
If you don’t want someone to change your life for you, you’ve got to change it yourself. (Vanishing Acts, pg. 339)
If you don’t want somwone to change your life for you, you’ve got to change it yourself. (Vanishing Acts, pg. 339)
People ask all the time how I’m doing, but the truth is, they don’t really want to know.
You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed – the length of a sleeping baby’s eyelash, the span of a child’s hand. Life turns on a dime, and – it turns out – so does one’s conscience.
It was the first time she’d discovered something she really didn’t want to find, and she didn’t know what to do once she’d found it.
Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn’t even know existed.
DO you think it hurts to die?” Not as much as it hurts to live, Trixie thought.
I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the’re hiding.
There are skeletons in everyone’s closet, things no one ever wants the world to discover.
Raw love, like raw heartache, could blindside you.
I was in the mood to make out in the back row of the movie theater with someone who did not know my first name. I wanted three guys to fight for the honor of buying me a drink
Raw love, like raw heart-ache, could blindside you.
The best way to prevent a heartache was to cushion the coming blow.
It turns out that I learned something from my dear old dad after all: firemen are experts at getting into places they shouldn’t be.
Polar north can’t get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what.
When I see him, his frame filling the doorway, I do not feel passion, excitement. I can’t remember if I ever have. He makes me feel comfortable, like a favorite pair of shoes.
I would prove to you that being different isn’t a death sentence but a call to arms.
Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.
We take the elevator to the third floor, to the office of Dr. Harrison Chance. His name alone has put me off. Why not Dr. Victor?
you’re not a bad person because you want to be yourself.
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 of their own kids.
Here’s my question: What age are you when you’re in Heaven?
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.
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.
That’s the crazy things about lies, you start to believe them yourself.” (pg. 342)
Do you ever go back?”Ruthann nods, “When I need to remember where I came from, or where I’m headed.
I …understand how a parent might hit a child- it’s because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn’t.
Chase every rung of possibility, and you still get absolutely nowhere.
We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that’s exactly right.” (pg. 481)
My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn’t all about me?
I woke up one morning thinking about wolves and realized that wolf packs function as families. Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack.
It’s certainly my honor to be able to, hopefully, change the world a tiny bit, one mind at a time.