I don’t think anyone who falls in love has a choice. You’re just pulled to that person like true north, whether it’s good for you or bound to break your heart.

On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive - the sum of the parts equal more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

What is right, in the end, is not always what it seems to be, and some rules are better broken.

Or in other words, it's the substance you've got when you start that determines the outcome.

Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.