No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you'd think.

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

But an apology too — you think you’re giving something, but you’re not. You’re really asking for something. You’re asking for forgiveness, you’re asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one.

It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it's, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal.

Darkness does this. It finds all the places you are hiding in. It finds all the things you are holding onto tightly and makes you let go.

I finally learned that it was all right to say something wasn’t working for me when it wasn’t working. The world doesn’t come crashing down when you speak the truth.

I don’t know why we insist on pain when pain is so often easy to eliminate. It’s funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we’ve committed some crime.