“It’s a good excuse, though, orphanhood. It explains everything—every mistake and wrong turn. As Sherlock Holmes declared. She had no mother to advise her. How we long for it, that lack of advice! Imprudence could have been ours. Passionate affairs. Reckless adventures. Of course we’re grateful for our stable upbringings, our hordes of informative relatives, our fleece-lined advantages, our lack of dramatic plots. But there’s a corner of envy in us all the same. Why doesn’t anything of interest happen to us, coddled as we are? Why do the orphans get all the good lines?”

“Why do we love anyone? It just happens. There’s something about the person which speaks to us. Then, in exploring it, we discover that those qualities which piqued our interest are far more outstanding than we knew. Wecontinue to reach for each other, and somewhere along the line our souls communicate.”

“The greatest defect we have in our prayers and in all that happens to us, particularly in that which concerns tribulations, is our lack of confidence ... Faith is great or little according to the measure of our confidence.”

“Because our birth mothers made a choice for us that dramatically changed the course of our lives and over which we had no control, many of us have a foundational belief (often unconscious) that we don't have the right to choose our own course in life. We feel instead that we are at the mercy of others.”

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”

“Nothing about us is right. We’re the wrongest kids you’ve ever seen. Our faces are wrong with zits, we have the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, and I think we might be ugly. Our families are wrong because none of us are rich, our bodies are wrong because we suck at sports, and there’s something really wrong with all of our personalities, because nobody likes us, not even the teachers. Teachers make fun of us too, and think we don’t notice.”