"You know, Sage, Jesus didn't tell us to forgive everyone. He said turn the other cheek, but only if you the one who was hit. Even the Lord's Prayer says it loud and clear: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Not others. What Jesus challenges us to do is to let go of the wrong done to you personally, not the wrong done to someone else. But most Christians incorrectly assume that this means that being a good christian means forgiving all sins, and the sinners."

"And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most poplar girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead."

"What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn't fit into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit? How come we haven't been able to change the puzzle instead?"

"My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men."

"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."

"I just completed The Tenth Circle. It is an excellent mystery story surrounding a family with modern day issues."

"It's never the differences between people that surprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common."

"I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting."

"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."

"Go fuck yourself Judge.""Motion denied." answers the judge dryly."

"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?"

"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?"

"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 your own, and when you're together,that light grows even brighter."

"Something still exists as long as there's someone still around to remember it."

"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?"

"It's certainly my honor to be able to, hopefully, change the world a tiny bit, one mind at a time."

"Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember."

"She sobbed the way she did everything else- with passion and excess."

"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."

"A robber? In the trash bins? Honestly, Wes. This is Salem Falls, not the set of Law and Order."

"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?"

"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."

"All it takes is a second and your whole life can get turned upside down."

"I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the're hiding."

"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."

"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."

"It's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works hard to keep things rolling smoothly, someone else sails along for the ride. Someone who would do anything to keep it the way it was in the beginning."

"Since when does anyone get the option to do the easiest?"

"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."

"She'd been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. 'You are so beautiful,' her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders.'You are so full of shit,' Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her like a net, she bore down and pushed."

"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."

"Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We are hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived."

"Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up."

"But sometimes, in order to win, you have to make sacrifices."

"No child really chooses his religion, it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in."

"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."

"The first time someone I loved left me behind...I didn't know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool."

"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."

"I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I won't have to live through it, I guess."

"To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her."

"I learn from my own daughter that you don't have to be awake to cry."

"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."

"Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place, maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was."

"Males conspicuously leaving their mark to let others know where they weren't welcome."

"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?"

"Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child."

"The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies."

"Dylan Jerome," the lawyer admits, "wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him."

"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."

"A trial, it often came down to who had the best story."