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21 " Science never failed to humble him, just as much as his faith, and he unequivocally believed that the two could exist side by side. "
― Jodi Picoult , A Spark of Light
22 " No matter how many times you let someone go, it never got any easier. "
23 " Vonita, God rest her soul, used to say that if men were the ones to get pregnant, abortion would probably be a sacrament. The Super Bowl halftime show would celebrate it. Men who had terminated pregnancies would be asked to stand and be applauded at church for the courage to make that decision. Viagra would be sold with a coupon for three free abortions. "
24 " The Center had suffered scars from the cuts of politicians and the barbs of protesters. It had licked its wounds and healed. At one point it had been called the Center for Women and Reproductive Health. But there were those who believed if you do not name a thing, it ceases to exist, and so its title was amputated, like a war injury. But still, it survived. First it became the Center for Women. And then, just: the Center. "
25 " Louie’s final thought before he passed out was that this was indeed some crazy world, where the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun. "
26 " We are all just canvases for our scars. "
27 " Your religion should help you make the decision if you find yourself in that situation, but the policy should exist for you to have the right to make it in the first place. When you say you can't do something because your religion forbids it, that's a good thing. When you say I can't do something because YOUR religion forbids it, that's a problem. "
28 " Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence. Sometimes you can’t recognize love because it’s changed you, like a chimera, so slowly that you didn’t witness the transformation. "
29 " Sometimes you can't tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence "
30 " It felt like the stamp of a passport when you reached your own country, and realized that the only reason you’d traveled was to remember the feeling of home. "
31 " Parenthood was like awakening to find a soap bubble in the cup of your palm, and being told you had to carry it while you parachuted from a dizzying height, climbed a mountain range, battled on the front lines. All you wanted to do was tuck it away, safe from natural disasters and violence and prejudice and sarcasm, but that was not an option. You lived in daily fear of watching it burst, of breaking it yourself. Somehow "
32 " Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, Dr. King had said, what are you doing for others? "
33 " Whether or not you believed a fetus was a human being, there was no question in anyone’s mind that a grown woman was one. Even if you placed moral value on that fetus, you couldn’t give it rights unless they were stripped away from the woman carrying it. Perhaps the question wasn’t When does a fetus become a person? but When does a woman stop being one? "
34 " Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence. "
35 " The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? —REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR "
36 " This is what it means to be human, Bex thought. We are all just canvases for our scars. "
37 " If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. "
38 " If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving. "
39 " He wished that he could keep getting up morning after morning, with the world remaining unchanged. That was the thing about feeling like life was good. Even when it was—especially when it was—you knew you had something to lose. "
40 " To live was always a conditional verb. "