“Someday, I'm going to have to break some of your rules, Mom.""I know," she said. "Try to do it behind my back, will you?¨You can bet on that, Mom.¨We both sat there and laughed.”

“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. 'I don't know', I said. 'Tomorrow.”

“Healthy people have healthy boundaries. Unhealthy people, well, let’s not get into that. It’s like this: some people have walls which means they let no one in. This equals unhealthy. Some people le...”

“I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.”

“Feeling sorry for myself was an art.”

“Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?”

“I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that.”

“I felt like a failure, like somehow my self-worth was tied to my ability to procreate. I didn't feel like I could talk about it. I did not want other people's pity, so I mostly kept my story and my...”

“My failures may be my greatest successes. It is in failure that I have often drawn closer to God, learn to depend more on Him than myself, gained self-knowledge, and seen things in their right pers...”

“[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the originalone emotion that time could never fade, and t...”

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'What is it then?'It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, bu...”

“I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution ...”