It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing. Which is why, when it happened, it hurt so badly.

[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.

I used to think I'd be just like them when I grew up, but I am not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway.

Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees.

It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don’t like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn’t speak that language. They didn’t learn it as children and they didn’t manage to pick it up as adults, either.

What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind - a trail made of stripped off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia - and who hands back each of these when its needed?

A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes...And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her.

Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.

She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.