Don't pay back in kind, pay back in kindness. If someone does wrong by you, do right by them.

I think that's probably the most devastating thing - when someone who is larger than life winds up a shadow of themselves in a hospital bed.

It makes Faith think of a hammock in their yard, a web of rope that she thought would unravel the first time she leaned back on it, but that managed to support her all the same.

Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?

I try really hard to ask people to take a look at their bookshelves. Are there female writers on it? Gay writers? Writers of color? There should be.

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.

Where did you go?" "To the end of the driveway," my mother says. "I was nine months pregnant; that was the maximum distance I could waddle without feeling as if my uterus was falling out." I wince. "Do you have to be quite so graphic?" "What would you like me to call it, Zoe? A fetal living room?