You can believe something really hard,' Faith says, 'and still be wrong.

How do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?

I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?

Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

Hunger, she often tells me, has nothing to do with the belly and everything to do with the mind. What Mary really runs isn't a bakery, but a community.

Some women are meant to change the world, while others are meant to hold it together. And then there are those of us who simply don't want to be in it, because we know no matter how much we struggle, we can't comfortably fit.