When she wanted to escape her life, she read books

You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.

In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do.

Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.

I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?