Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you're with feel like they matter.

Life isn't nearly as stable as we want it to be.

I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.

Teachers deserve respect," I explain. "Why do they get it for free, when everyone else has to earn it?

and another claimed it was inherited through a parent who was a carrier of the defective gene. I had always assumed the latter was the case with Claire. After all, surely a child who grew out of grief would be born with a heavy heart.

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?

When I was little, the great mystery to me was not how babies were made, but why?