Remember when you were a little kid and you'd fall asleep in the car? And someone would carry you out and put you into bed, so that when you woke up in the morning, you knew automatically you were home again? That's what I think it's like to die.

You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.' How?' Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

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

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

You keep distracting me,” I tell her. “All I’m doing is sitting here talking to you!” “Exactly,” I say, and I smile at her.j

The ideas choose me, not the other way around.