“And just like that, I became my mother. We all do, if only for a moment at a time. That person we never think we will be like when we grow up is the person we see in our own reflection. How did that happen so fast?”

“At that moment we knew that as long as we used our brains, we were not victims. By striking out to write our own ticket, we would grow up to be like our mother, winners.”

“In her hometown, she seems like someone else; maybe more like the person she used to be, like the person we all leave behind in our hometowns, the person whose skin we must wrestle into when we come back, like an old suit or a dress we once wore on a special occasion, one we can't quite understand how the passage of time has left the garment as it was, and us so unaware of how we've changed, as we suck in our guts to do up the zipper.”

“How awful we are all when we look at ourselves under a light, finally seeing our reflections+. How little we know about ourselves. How much forgivennes it must take to love a person , to choose not to see their flaws, or to see those flaws and love the person anyway. If you never forgive you'll always be alone.”

“Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography," our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?”

“I believe that appreciation is a holy thing--that when we look for what's best in a person we happen to be with at the moment, we're doing what God does all the time. So in loving and appreciating our neighbor, we're participating in something sacred.”