“My friends and family had put the bedroom back together and I woke the next morning thinking, for one brief second, that it was just another beautiful early-spring day. As I sat up, though, my body began to weep even before my mind recognized the cause for grieving. The world would never be the same. Everything I would make from that day on would recall how it had changed. Everything I did for myself would be in the name of what we had been.”

“We can win.We can lose.We can fall down.We can get up and do it over again, better.We can go for it as if we have nothing to lose, knowing we have everything to lose....We can tear up a dance floor and put it all back together again.We can talk loud in public.We can be fierce.We can be small.We can be mighty.We can be too much.We can be just enough, just in time.We can.We have to.”

“Because art does for me what religion does-- it organizes a seemingly chaotic world. Because it is my way of making sense of the world and its changes.”

“I sat with my two best friends, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that only two of us would make it out of there alive. Though I did tend to exaggerate.”

“When I am in pain, I must know that beauty always has been and always will be. This is as close to eternity as I need to be.”

“I knew by then that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her all my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there's no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate.”

“What would my life, have been like, if I hadn't been put up for adoption? Who would my parents have been then? Or my parent, my mother?”