I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

This was the reason there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that didn't have words big enough to describe them.

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.

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.

They don't really pay attention to me, except when they need my blood or something. I wouldn't even be alive, if it wasn't for Kate being sick.

You don't love someone because they're perfect," she says. "You love them in spite of the fact that they're not." I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty-five years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather green.

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.