Quotes from book

Handle With Care

“I think you can love a person too much.

You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.”

“Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.”

“I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.”

“They're fake bullets, so why do I feel like Im bleeding out?”

“[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.”

“Or in other words, it's the substance you've got when you start that determines the outcome.”

“There are kinds of pain that you can't speak out loud.”

“Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.”

“People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.”

“I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.”

“Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.”

“Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.”

“I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I'd hurt Rob. Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.”

“Until I understood why you didn't cry, even though it hurt: there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.”

“There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.”

“What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.”

“Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.”

“Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?”

“That's what happens to dreams, life gets in the way.”