"I [Jacob Hunt, Aspie] see it as the next step of evolution: I cannot take away your sadness, so why should I acknowledge it?"

"My first strike was marrying a guy without a college degree. My second and third were getting pregnant. I suppose that when I didn't go on to become the next Gloria Allred, she was justified in counting me a failure. And I suppose that until now, I was justified in thinking that I wasn't one."

"What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand.I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size."

"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."

"Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"What she really meant was: here is my heart, have a care."

"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."

"[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, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself."

"A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you."

"[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. "Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we're out of purgatory for the weekend." Maybe later, I murmur, still distracted by the day's previous events."So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested."Huh? I say."

"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. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell."

"Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions."

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

"I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA."

"How can you ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom."

"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've done your job - no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid."

"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."

"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."

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

"You don't have to say I love you to say I love you."

"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."

"What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did."

"Our culture promotes individuality, while the Amish are deeply entrenched in community. To us, if someone stands out, it's no big deal because diversity is respected and expected. To the Amish, there's no room for deviation from the norm. It's important to fit in, because that similarity of identity is what defines the society. If you don't fit in, the consequences are psychological tragic, you stand alone when all you've ever known is being part of the group."

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

"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."

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

"Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn't even any guilt."

"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."

"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."

"Wenn jemand starb, dem du dein Herz geschenkt hattest, nahm er es dann mit?"

"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 as Bitawkdakinna. I don't know enough Abenaki to be sure it's a real word, but translated, it is the world between. I had become a bridge between the natural world and the human one. I fit into both places and belonged to neither. Half of my heart lived with the wild wolves, the other half lived with my family."

"By now you've already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. you think i am either a hero, or a monster. maybe knowning more about circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago."

"There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones."

"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."

"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."

"Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank."

"Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees."

"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."

"The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak."

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

"If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going."

"Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damagers awards."

"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."

"At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something that everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgettingone how painful it had been at the time."

"To find out a heart she'd believed irrevocably broken had somewhere along the way been fixed."

"And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt."