Adversity in life does not rob your heart of beauty. It simply teaches it a new song to sing.

Every woman should have a daughter to tell her stories to. Otherwise, the lessons learned are as useless as spare buttons from a discarded shirt. And all that is left is a fading name and the shape of a nose or the color of hair. The men who write the history books will tell you the stories of battles and conquests. But the women will tell you the stories of people's hearts.

Moving on doesn't mean forgetting.

But there is room now in my heart for more memories, carved by a letting go that I could find only by coming home to a place I'd never been.

Sometimes we make decisions because it seems to be the only path visible at the moment. It's only later that we see there was more than one path, but the others were blocked from our vision at the time. That's the thing with hindsight, you see. Even if you can see it clearly, there's no going back. It's at that point we need to turn around and stare ahead and make a new life.

The word that came to me now was "defiant." Because a person had to be defiant to be able to stand amid the wreckage of her life and instead of shaking a fist, pick up a hammer.

There are no completely good or bad people. Everybody makes mistakes, or bad choices. It's how we live with them that make us the people we are.