A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.

Good luck, I'm beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it - no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is - the most incomprehensible idea of all.

Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.

Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.