“I realize it's not the best timing-it's only been a month, but life isn't about waiting for perfect timing. If you're not careful, life happens while your stuck in a holding pattern”

“Joy, I realized, isn't so much a circumstance you find yourself in but a choice you make”

“All the best things in life start with a risk.”

“Sometimes life goes by in a trickle and sometimes life goes by in a flood. It's in those rainy seasons you find out how well you can swim.”

“I wrote about the rush of love, the changing of a woman into a mother—a process that happened without conscious thought, as if the heart knew what the mind and body took time to learn. Love is the one thing that matters. That makes everything else matter. That makes everything worthwhile.”

“How often ... do we pass by a need, a life that could be changed with the smallest bit of effort? And it's not that we don't care but that we're driving so fast, all we see are the fence posts flashing by on the side of the highway?Maybe the first step in changing the world is in slowing down and looking through the fences.”

“My heart filled with Nick's smile, with the look of sheer adoration he gave me as he lugged the bucket. In the space of an instant, I felt it again—the crumbling of an old part of me, the growth of something new. The changing of my heart into a mother's heart. It happened at the strangest times, in the most unexpected ways. Nick looked at me, and the love I felt for him was almost painful in its intensity. I'd never known I had it in me, the capacity to love this way. ... But when Nick looked at me, my mind tumbled through nights and mornings, seasons and years in the future. ... I saw a future like none I'd ever imagined. I wanted it, every minute of it.”