“Believe it or not, that was the first time I recognized that in some ways she was just like the rest of us.”

“By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to.”

“Believing the lie that time will heal all wounds is just a nice way of saying that time deadens us.”

“Some times I think this whole worldIs one big prison yeardSome of us are prisonersThe rest of us are guards”

“It was shepherds who were the first to recognize a king that the rest of the world refused to acknowledge.”

“Not for the first time, I wished both of us could just say what we meant. But that, like so much else, was impossible”