There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind.
Can a person not be two things at once?
So maybe there is a place in your life you wear out like a rut, or even better, like the soft spot on the couch. And no matter what else happens to you, you come back to that.
It struck her that dispensing justice was really more about being present and engaged than anything else – unlike.
But my mother also would have been the first to tell me that good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.
Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.” “What’s the difference?” “The best thing is what you think should be done. The rightest thing is what needs to be done – when you think not just of you and how you feel, but also the extra stuff – who else is involved, and what’s happened before, and what the rules say.
Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent.
When you’re seventeen, it’s all about the now, not the after.
After all, the last thing Kenosi saw, before he closed his eyes forever, was his mother coming back to him.
You see, I tell myself. Here is proof. I’ve known Christina my whole life. And yes, maybe there are differences between us – socioeconomic, political, racial – but that doesn’t mean we can’t connect, human to human, friend to friend.
No. Your religion should help you make the decision if you find yourself in that situation. But the policy should exist for you to have the right to make it in the first place. When you say you can’t do something because your religion forbids it, that’s a good thing. When you say I can’t do something because your religion forbids it, that’s a problem.
Maybe however much you’ve loved someone, that’s how much you can hate. It’s like a pocket turned inside out. It stands to reason that the opposite should be true, too.
Her mind is running in circles, like a gerbil on a wheel, the same way mine is. Chase every rung of possibility, and you still get absolutely nowhere.
Some feel that because they lived, it’s their responsibility to tell the world what happened, so it won’t happen again, and so people won’t forget. Others believe that the only way to go on with the rest of their lives is to act as if it never happened.
I’ve always wondered whether she sees what I do when I look at her.
Being adopted felt like reading a book that had the first chapter ripped out.
I always knew Fitz would wind up writing; although I figured he’d be a poet or a storyteller. He would play with language the way other children played with stones and twigs, building structures for the rest of us to decorate with our imagination.
Morality has nothing to do with religion,” she says. “You can do the right thing and not believe in God at all.
And that the half-second she is gifted before she remembers the truth is the only reason she gets up each morning.
Can you miss a person you’ve never known?” There.
See, unlike the rest of the free world, I didn’t get here by accident. And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it’s gone, so are you.