“Being negative is easy. There will always be a downside to everything good, a hurdle to everything desirable, a con to every pro. The real courage is in finding the good in what you have, the opportunities in every hurdle, the pros in every con.”

“Relationships are complicated, but happiness in a relationship isn't: It's just wanting exactly what you have. Wanting something else is dispiriting.”

“..a new baby is not uninterrupted bliss. It's joy mixed with terror, fatigue, depression, intense feelings of helplessness, loneliness and inadequacy. And poop.”

“The pros and cons of being a criminal: Pros—are cons that haven’t been caught. Cons—are former pros that made a mistake.”

“Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge--desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]”

“In the end everything will be okay. But hurdles have to be jumped through first.”

“Sometimes I wonder how we can be so sure what it is God sees. How arrogant we are, I sometimes think, to imagine there's someone watching us every minute. To think our every action matters that much.”