I have only known her for two years. But if you took every memory, every moment, if you stretched them end to end-they'd reach forever.

A heroin-thin boy with enough rings in his eyebrows to resemble a shower curtain rod.

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

The problem isn’t with rock lyrics, it’s with the fabric of this society itself.

You’ll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you’re still the one in control.

As it turned out, though, it was a lot easier to say that someone deserved to die for what they did than it was to take the responsibility to make that happen.