“I'd like to say that this time I'd kill myself too..but I've never had that kind of courage.”

“I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?”

“I'm not saying you did the wrong thing. I'm not even saying it wasn't something I'd thought of doing, myself. But even if it was the just thing to do, or the fitting thing, it still wasn't the right thing.”

“I'd try to stuff myself into one of these scenarios, but it's like wearing a size five sneaker when your foot is a seven--you can get by for a few steps, and then you sit down and pull off the shoe because it just plain hurts too much.”

“I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live”

“There are a lot of places," I reply, "that I thought I'd never go.”

“It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?”