One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.

Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour," she'd ask us, "when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?

When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.

I hadn’t been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn’t really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim

If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one.

It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.