I adore the way he looks at me sometimes, as if love is a quantity he cannot measure scientifically, because it multiplies too quickly.

I imagine the touch of someone who loves you so much, he cannot bear to watch you sleep; and so you wake up with his hand on your heart.

A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.

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.

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

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 think I have sort of gravitated toward issues that I don't know the answers to, because that's what's more interesting for me to write.

Everytime I look at a zebra, I can't figure out whether it's black with white stripes or white with black stripes, and that frustrates me.

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.

How do you walk into someone's life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.

She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime.

The legal system works really well, if you communicate a certain way. But if you don't, it all goes to Hell in a handbasket really quickly.

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 you look into your baby’s eyes,” Lacy said softly, “you see everything you hope they can be…not everything you wish they won’t become.

Marina sighs. "Love's a tidal wave," she says. "Because it sweeps you off your feet?" I ask. "No. Because it sucks you under and you drown.

You don't make a friend," Jacob said with a scowl. "It's not like they come with directions like you'd find on a box of macaroni and cheese.

You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever

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 think that's probably the most devastating thing - when someone who is larger than life winds up a shadow of themselves in a hospital bed.

Why are terms of endearment always food? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. Its not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.

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.

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.

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.

How do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?

There are two reasons not to tell the truth--becuase lying will get you what you want, and because lying will keep someone from getting hurt.

No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.

‎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.

Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your life was just going to be a series of days that were all the same, that were do-overs?

Many of my books come from what if questions that I can't answer, things that I'm worried about as either a woman, a wife, a mom, an American.

it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.

They don't really pay attention to me, except when they need my blood or something. I wouldn't even be alive, if it wasn't for Kate being sick.

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

I have always written about subjects that engage me - questions I can't answer myself. They apparently tend to be big moral and ethical issues!

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.

In fairytales, when the mask came off, the handsome prince still loved the girl, no matter what -and that alone would turn her into a princess.

A man should live his life a certain way not because of some divine authority, but because of a personal moral obligation to himself and others.

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

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.

Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed.

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 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.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you.

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

I know how difficult it can be when the image you've had of something doesn't match its reality; when the friend beside you turns into a monster.

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?

Being a teenager isn't all that different from being part of someone else's story. There's always someone who thinks they know better than you do

What could it be like to find out, in a matter of minutes, that the person you believed the sun rose and set on was not the person you'd thought?

My favorite part of any event is a Q&A. I do get asked a lot of the same questions but every now and then someone surprises me - and I LOVE that.

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

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