She stares at me for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing. “You haven’t seen his perfect little wife and his perfect little girls. Believe me, Oliver, I’m not the great love of his life, the one he’ll never forget.” “You are to me,” I say.

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

But it was like wearing a size five sneakers when your foot is a seven- you can get by for a few steps, and then you set down and pull off the shoes because it just plain much

There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.

You can miss a person you've never known.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

If you loved someone, really loved them, would you let them go?