Things break all the time. Glass, and dishes, and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever. Promises break Hearts break.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons in life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. - Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

I understood why you didn't cry, even though it hurt: there were kinds of pain you can't speak out loud.

It's funny, isn't it, how you can be 100 percent sure of your opinion on something until it happens to you.

It's not that I don't feel like breaking down- it's that someone's got to be the strong one, so that you all don't have to be.

Folks who are trying to be kind would rather do it with macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you've done your job-no need to get personally involved, and you conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.

Piety and Pity were a little too close to each other for my tastes.

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills up every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. It's breath is full of lies; it smells of spite. And just at this moment, it chose to rear it's ugly head.

Facebook is supposed to be a social network, but the truth is, most people I know who use it spend so much time online tweaking our profiles and writing graffiti on other people's walls or poking them that we never leave our computers to actually socially interact.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye. Take the mother who was handing a toy to her toddler in the backseat one moment, and in a massive motor vehicle accident the next. Or the frat boy who was chugging a beer on the porch as the police drove up to arrest him for sexually assaulting another student. The wife who opened up the door to find a police officer bearing the news of her husband's death.

Could you see doubt written on a face? Did it settle in the fine lines around the eyes, the bracket of the mouth?

They're fake bullets, so why do I still feel like I'm bleeding?

You don't have to say "I love you" to say "I love you", all you have to do is say my name and I know.

People who didn't talk about their problems got to pretend they didn't have any. People who discussed what was wrong, on the other hand, fought and ached and felt miserable.

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

You were so busy putting out the fire directly in front of you that you were completely oblivious to the inferno raging at your back.

Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who'd let us go. We lived in our own grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.

I did not look like someone whose life was falling apart. I did not look like a girl who had to make herself vomit to feel like she could do something right. I did not look like the kind of daughter who was hated by my mother, ignored by my father. To be honest, I didn't know who the hell I was anymore.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: we take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.