Vanishing Acts

It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.

You make yourself strong because it's expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.

Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

You can't exist in this world without leaving a piece of yourself behind.

It took me a lifetime to realizethings don't get lost if they don't have value- you don't miss what you don't care about.

Just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up.

Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?

Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength - and the honesty - to break them down.

Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

The only way someone can leave you is if you let them.

When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he'll crave you in the same way you crave him.

What if it turns out that a life isn’t defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you’ve lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?

I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.

It's choice that makes us human.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.

If his voice hasn't been the melody of my life, it's been the bass line, so subtle you don't notice it until it's missing.

Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

Who I am, and what I am capable of doing has always managed to surprise me.

That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one

When I'm with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that's backing up.

I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness. But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me?... Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

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.

I know better than most people that a criminal isn't always a thug in a black leather jacket with a big brand on his forehead to warn us away. Criminals sit next to us on the bus. They pack our groceries and cash our paychecks for us and teach our children. They look no different from you or me. And that's why they get away with it.

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep it close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

Love is the most dangerous craving of all, if you ask me. It turns us into people we aren't. It makes us feel like hell, and makes us walk on water. It ruins us for anything else.

The desperate usually succeed because they have nothing to lose.