That’s what parenting is all about. Doing the best you can while being terrified of screwing up. Kids.
Hope might leave me crushed in the end, but losing all hope somehow seemed even worse. I.
I don’t think you did anything wrong. It’s just that relationships are hard, and both people have to want them to work.
There are too many fault lines to count now.
College was a bubble that kept the rest of the world at bay. There was an abundance of free time, friends who lived either with you or right next door, and an overwhelming sense of optimism about the future, even if you had no idea as to the specifics of what that might mean. In college, everyone accepted the fact that their lives would turn out exactly as planned, buoying them from one good memory to the next in a cascade of carefree three-day weekends.
Like Clara’s, Dawson’s ghost was everywhere.
I never stopped loving you, Ronnie. And I never stopped thinking about you. Even if summers do come to an end.
And I’d be struck a new by the finality of Ruth’s absence.
Because he believed in honesty and integrity, my father believed that others did as well. He believed in human decency and assumed others were just like him. He believed that most people, when given the choice, would do what was right, even when it was hard, and he believed that good almost always triumphed over evil. He wasn’t naive, though.
She loved me with a passion, but I felt it in her expressions, in her touch, in the tender brush of her lips. And, when I needed it most, she loved me with the written word as well.
I held her close to me with my eyes closed, wondering if anything in my life had ever been this perfect and knowing at the same time that it hadn’t.
Both. Some of the children here came from really horrible situations. It’s enough to break your heart when you hear about it. But when they see you come in with some books from the library or a new game to play, their smiles just take all the sadness away. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.
It’s the possibility that keeps me going, not the guarantee, a sort of wager on my part.
I know that’s not a popular notion – don’t we frequently regard our elders as wise partially because they’re gray and wrinkled? – but lately I’ve come to believe that some people are born with the capacity to become wise while others aren’t, and in some people, wisdom seems to be evident even at a young age. My.
Maybe God has a better plan for me than I had for myself.
Having kids means taking care of them, raising them, loving and supporting them, and none of those things have anything to do with who makes them one night in the bedroom or the experience of being pregnant.
Friendship isn’t about how long you know someone. It’s about who walks into your life, says ‘I’m here for you,’ and then proves it.
Words – especially written ones, meant only for us – have a power to comfort, tell truths, and communicate profound emotions in a way that few things can.
Being together isn’t about a honeymoon. It’s about the real you and me. I want to wake up with you beside me in the mornings, I want to spend my evenings looking at you across the dinner table. I want to share every mundane detail of my day with you and hear every detail of yours. I want to laugh with you and fall asleep with you in my arms. Because you aren’t just someone I loved back then. You were my best friend, my best self, and I can’t imagine giving that up again.
Despite her near delirium, she noticed Jared’s eyes flicking constantly to the rearview mirror, disappointment and anger warring in his expression. She sometimes thought that he shed a large part of his innocence that night, a child confronting his parent’s awful shortcomings.