Sometimes you simply made the wrong choice and you had to live with it. You could only change the future.

Sometimes being a good friend means saying nothing.

Jude remembered this pain. Every woman had felt some version of it: the end of first love. It was when you learned, for good and always, that love could be impermanent.

It occurred to her suddenly, sharply, that she wanted to be in love... She wanted not to feel so damned alone in the world.

Time goes too quickly. This is the advice that my mother should have given me from her hospital bed. Instead of vague, unknowable quips like "Be careful what you wish for," she should have told me time slides away on a hillside of loose shale and takes everything in its path - dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all.

What I know now about life is this: your mother is a part of everything you do and everything you are.

At one point, she'd wanted to hurl the whole breakfast at the wall. And then she'd remember why it was that men had temper tantrums and women didn't: cleanup.