Even the most beautiful things can be toxic.

Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours.

It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.

Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage.

Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief.

I used to pretend that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one.

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.