"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."

"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."

"The thing about a mom is that she's always there. She's the one who rubs your back when you have the flu, who manages to notice you have no clean underwear and does your wash for you, who stocks the refrigerator with all the foods you love without having to ask. The thing about a mom is that you never imagine taking care of her, instead of the other way around."

"The constellation she's named after tells the story of a princess, who was shackled to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster--punishment for her mother Casseopeia, who had bragged to Poseidon about her own beauty. Perseus, flying by, fell in love with Andromeda and saved her. In the sky, she's pictured with her arms outstretched and her hands chained."

"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 a toddler. Before I understood that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"What would you do if you only had one day left in this world? Spend it with the people you love? Travel to the far corners of the earth to see as many wonders as possible? Eat nothing but chocolate? Would you apologize for all your mistakes? Would you stand up to those you'd never had the courage to face? Would you tell your secret crush that you loved him or her? Why is it that we wait till the last minute to do the things we should be doing all along?"

"Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry."

"I don't know what you think of me. And you certainly would never picture us together. But probably peanut butter was just peanut butter for a long time, before someone ever thought of pairing it with jelly. And there was salt, but it started to taste better when there was pepper. And what's the point of butter without bread? (Why are all these examples of FOODS?!!?!?!?!?!?!) Anyway by myself I'm nothing special. But with you I could be."

"Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without."

"People believe in God because they don't have any other explanation for things that happen."

"What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?"

"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."

"Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true."

"There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... 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."

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

"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'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live."

"[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."

"Words are like eggs dropped from great heights, you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall."

"You can argue that it's a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It's the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It's the chasm between being invited to a colleague's wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering."

"(24/7) once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer."

"Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean."

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

"I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store-ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling's knees-people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phony family.Maybe it's not so different from real photos, after all."

"At 17, 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 was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time."

"The cost of growth is always a small act of violence."

"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."

"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."

"When they laugh, it sounds like confetti."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The best way to prevent a heartache was to cushion the coming blow."

"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."

"So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I'd forgotten to communicate?"

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

"But kids don't stay where they're supposed to. You turn around and find her not in the bedroom but hiding in a closet; you turn around and see she's not three but thirteen. 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."

"Because in the past words have only driven them apart."

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

"But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It's like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation's there, but it's useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone's imagination."

"You have to understand " there is a romance to Africa. You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God. You watch the slow lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heat, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world."

"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."

"Then Henry speaks again. "Did he do it?"I turn to him slowly. "Does it matter?"

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

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

"How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?"