But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?

Wheather it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half - before and after - with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.

You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.

After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken.

Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids... but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.