Each story, good and bad, short or long-from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness-they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits.

You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you'd probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it.

Once, I had to drive Oliver to soccer, was ten minutes late, and learned that there had apparently been a misprint in the Bible on the Ten Commandments thing: Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not be late to soccer. My father was so pissed, I practically had to get the lightning bolt surgically removed from my back.

Love was also an easy word, used carelessly. Felons and creeps could offer it coated in sugar, and users could dangle it so enticingly that you wouldn't notice that it had things attached - heavy things, things like pity and need, that were weighty as anchors and iron beams and just as impossible to get out from underneath.

When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog.

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

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.