I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

I think there are crossroads in our lives when we make grand, sweeping decisions without even realizing it.

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.

How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?

We believe what we want to, what we need to. The corollary is that we choose not to see what we'd rather pretend doesn't exist.

A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it...You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.

Maybe honesty is overvalued. What's truly priceless is picking out from a stream of falsehoods the ones you most need to hear.