Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn't it sound like it should be true?

How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

Which is worse, Risa often wondered, to have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted or to silently make then go away before they were even born

He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between - and while he's had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands that he'll never reach.

Sometimes, though, you make a pact with yourself. I'll pretend there's nothing wrong if you pretend there's nothing wrong. It's called denial, and it's one of the strongest pacts in the world. Just ask all those people who were still drinking champagne while the Titanic went down.

The homes here are almost identical, but not quite, full of people almost identical, but not quite.

I'm tired of eating your family's lousy, tasteless recipes," Dad said. "Tasteless recipes? My grandmother's rolling in her grave!" "It's from indigestion.