Perfect Match

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.

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

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.

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.

You build a wall to keep something unwanted out … or to hold something precious in.

Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner.

You saved me," I said. Nathaniel put his hands on either side of my face. "I had to," he said. "So you could save me back.

As it turns out, you can function while your heart is being torn to shreds.

We have been naive enough to believe that we were invincible; that we could run blind through the hairpin turns of life at treacherous speeds and never crash.

But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Envy comes from wanting something that isn't yours, but grief comes from losing something you've already had.

But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago-and you are willing to do whatever it takes?

There is a gulf as wide as an ocean between should and want, and I am drowning in it.

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.

Just when you think you've got your life by the reins, that's when it's most likely to run away with you.

Maybe honesty is overvalued. What's truly priceless is picking out from a stream of falsehoods the ones you most need to hear.

but if I've learned anything, it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.

Does fate ever play by the rules?

After all, the only way to communicate is to find someone who can comprehend; the only way to be forgiven is to find someone who is willing to forgive.

You ask your readers if they can account for every minute of their lives, every thought in their heads, and be proud of it. You ask them if they've never jaywalked.... never gone thirty-one miles per hour in a thirty-mile zone... if they've never sped up when they saw that yellow light. And when you find that single, sorry person who hasn't taken a misstep, that one person with the right to judge me, you tell him he's just as human as I am. That tomorrow, his world could turn upside down and he might find himself capable of actions he'd never believed possible... you tell him, he could have been me.

And I think, not for the first time, that what is immoral is not always wrong.

What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

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. but then, caleb taught me long ago you can't build anything without some sort of foundation. maybe we learn to live our lives by understanding, firsthand, how not to live them.

Asking me to describe my son is like asking me to hold the ocean in a paper cup

I'm not saying you did the wrong thing. I'm not even saying it wasn't something I'd thought of doing, myself. But even if it was the just thing to do, or the fitting thing, it still wasn't the right thing.

Nathaniel closes his eyes and jumps, his arms glued to his sides like that fly's. He doesn't try to break his fall, just hits hard, because it hurts less than everything else.

...because he believed that if you wanted to get rid of a hole, you filled it. He had not realized at the time that there were all sorts of filler that took up space, but had no substance. That made you feel just as empty.

How far can a person go... and still live with himself.

the relationship between people knot so easily, there needs to be a person skilled at working free the threads. Sometimes, though, the only way to extricate a tangle is to cut it out and start fresh.

When the door opens, I realize that the only thing worse than waiting is the moment you realize a decision has been made.