No matter what you do for someone-no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or give him food so he’s not hungry-make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you become someone unrecognizable.
What I think is that there is no perspective in grief, or in love. How can there be, when one person becomes the center of the universe – either because he has been lost or because he has been found?
It’s a world of permanence.
I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. – Vladimir Nabokov.
What is ethical to a lawyer differs from what’s ethical to the rest of the world.
When Javert finally realized that Valjean had something he himself didn’t – mercy – did he shrug and find a new obsession, like knitting or Game of Thrones? No. Because without Valjean to hate, he didn’t know who he was anymore.
The truth is, if I do miraculously manage to put the right words together, it’s by default, because I’ve already used up all the wrong ones.
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. – Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl.
What if the characters in a book had lives of their own after the cover was closed?
To be forgiven, the person has to be sorry. In Judaism, that’s called teshuvah. It means ‘turning away from evil.’ It’s not a one-time deal, either. It’s a course of action. A single act of repentance is something that makes the person who committed the evil feel better, but not the person against whom evil was committed.
I’ve thought a lot about it: how you can ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom. I’ve thought about all the things I could have done differently, and if it would have led to another outcome. But thinking doesn’t change anything, does it?
The Center had suffered scars from the cuts of politicians and the barbs of protesters. It had licked its wounds and healed. At one point it had been called the Center for Women and Reproductive Health. But there were those who believed if you do not name a thing, it ceases to exist, and so its title was amputated, like a war injury. But still, it survived. First it became the Center for Women. And then, just: the Center.
Louie’s final thought before he passed out was that this was indeed some crazy world, where the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun.
The truth is, sometimes things don’t happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it’s just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.
I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow in it. “what happen then?” “what else,” I said “It broke.
How incredibly easy it is to hide behind white skin, I think, looking at these probable supremacists. The benefit of the doubt is in your favor. You’re not suspicious.
We are all just canvases for our scars.
Mooooooooooom!” When I yell like that, she can come quick as a ghost, the air empty one minute and full of her the next.
I thought I knew this world. I thought I could control it. But just when you think you’ve got your life by the reins, that’s when it’s most likely to run away from you.
There were entire days where I did nothing but cry; others where I felt like I’d swallowed a lead plate; some more where I worked really hard at going through the motions of getting dressed and making my bed and studying my vocab words because it was easier than doing anything else.