“Once you start making decisions in which your heart, mind, and soul are congruent, you'll feel it as a kind of lift, if not liftoff.”

“I got tears in my eyes, but they were not the crying kind, they were just the kind that show you your body agrees so much with what your mind just said.”

“...what John likes best are the small and undramatic moments that make for a kind of easy comfort, for a feeling of being grounded in arelationship.”

“You must never check for a person's pulse using your thumb, or you'll feel your own heartbeat. Actually, I plan on doing that if I'm the one who's here when Ruth dies. I plan on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go.”

“Well, most women are full to the brim, that's all...We are, most of us, ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with "Mommy" embroidered over the left breast, over the heart...If a stranger had come up to me and said, "Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen," I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it.”

“Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish, or you'd go crazy. It was the psychological equivalent to fainting when physical pain became overbearing.”

“I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?”