“When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.”

“Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.”

“Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.”

“Kid says to me, "You play baseball? What position? Left out?" and gets a big laugh from the rest of the class. Kid is only one person out of 6.792 billion humans on this planet. This planet is only one-eighth of the solar system, whose sun is one of two billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Put it that way, the comment loses it's importance.”

“Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be aquarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows upand becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won’t catch anyone’sattention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.”

“No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.”

“What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline crack.”