Sometimes you've got to make a mess before you clean it up.

We can get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.

I thought I might cry, the way you do when someone gives you some kindness when you most need it but when it seems the most surprising thing.

Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. . . . You've got to ignore the one big truth - life is fatal.

So I forcibly shove aside my prickles of pissed-off, which is easier than it sounds when millions of little sequined caffeine dancers are doing their big Broadway number on your internal stage. (Page 173)

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

The most true-love words are not the ones that grasp and hold and bind you, twisting you both up together in some black dance. No, they are ones that leave you free to stand alone on your own solid ground, leave him to do the same, a tender space between you.