At the root of every large struggle in life is the need to be honest about something that we do not feel we can be honest about. We lie to ourselves or other people because the truth might require action on our part, and action requires courage. We say we “don’t know” what is wrong, when we do know what is wrong; we just wish we didn’t. Art lets us tell the truth, but even art can be something to hide behind.

Too often in my life, love has been defined as "humiliation with occasional roses".

So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.

Another person is, at the heart of it, unknowable. And if you cannot know a person enough to always guess what they’re capable of, you certainly cannot know them enough to hold them in your hands, to control their behavior, to fight, manipulate, cajole or nurse or soothe them into doing what they should or shouldn’t. People will do what they will do. The trick is admitting your own helplessness about that little fact.

I know parental embarrassment usually stops somewhere at fifteen, but he just kept on giving me good reasons.

Fear was the biggest bullshitter, he’d said. But sometimes, too, fear told the truth.

A drop of poison on that gathering snow. That moment in the fairy tale when we know what just happened but the princess doesn’t.