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1 " Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had. "
― Jodi Picoult , Perfect Match
2 " Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner. "
3 " If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over- only living with the mistakes you've made. "
4 " Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without. "
5 " You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed - the length of a sleeping baby's eyelash, the span of a child's hand. Life turns on a dime, and - it turns out - so does one's conscience. "
6 " You build a wall to keep something unwanted out … or to hold something precious in. "
7 " You saved me," I said. Nathaniel put his hands on either side of my face. "I had to," he said. "So you could save me back. "
8 " As it turns out, you can function while your heart is being torn to shreds. "
9 " We have been naive enough to believe that we were invincible; that we could run blind through the hairpin turns of life at treacherous speeds and never crash. "
10 " But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it? "
11 " But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago-and you are willing to do whatever it takes? "
12 " There is a gulf as wide as an ocean between should and want, and I am drowning in it. "
13 " Just when you think you've got your life by the reins, that's when it's most likely to run away with you. "
14 " If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over - only living with the mistakes you've made. "
15 " Maybe honesty is overvalued. What's truly priceless is picking out from a stream of falsehoods the ones you most need to hear. "
16 " but if I've learned anything, it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all. "
17 " Does fate ever play by the rules? "
18 " After all, the only way to communicate is to find someone who can comprehend; the only way to be forgiven is to find someone who is willing to forgive. "
19 " You ask your readers if they can account for every minute of their lives, every thought in their heads, and be proud of it. You ask them if they've never jaywalked.... never gone thirty-one miles per hour in a thirty-mile zone... if they've never sped up when they saw that yellow light. And when you find that single, sorry person who hasn't taken a misstep, that one person with the right to judge me, you tell him he's just as human as I am. That tomorrow, his world could turn upside down and he might find himself capable of actions he'd never believed possible... you tell him, he could have been me. "
20 " And I think, not for the first time, that what is immoral is not always wrong. "
