“I have too much doubt. Its the bastard child of fear. I hate fear. So doubt sidles up next to determination in my heart. It doesnt outweigh it. They coexist.”

“I dont want to be my limitations. I dont want to be my pain. I dont want to be my embarrassment.”

“the person youve always wanted to be. Some days your heart will be in it, and some days youll fake it, but eventually it will become a habit and without thinking about it, you will be changed anew....”

“Sometimes Im irrational, I know I am, but even irrational thought feels very, very real when youre in the middle of shit.”

“Genetics doesnt ensure love, or even like, time and effort do. You dont give them your time, and you dont show them effort”

“Because thats what parents do, without even thinking about it, thats what parents do. They fill their children with love and understanding and compassion and knowledge so that when theyre adults no...”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.”

“Dont cry and dont rage. Understand.”

“The only way to heal yourself was to understand. Understand the love or the hate or the cowardice, or the impulsiveness, the lack of will of the one who hurt you--the circumstances that twisted the...”