No doubt about it: Mac would make an excellent mother.

And part of brilliance isn’t just solving a problem; it’s seeing a problem no one else realizes is a problem yet.

I don’t get the big deal myself. If you can die for your country at eighteen, why not have a beer?

Is your father really evil?” I heard myself ask. “Yes.” “Because he drank, did drugs?” “No, honey. Because God made him that way, and he liked it. Your father had an excuse. My father doesn’t.

We are both women who understand there’s no point to the coulda, woulda, shouldas of life.

I wonder if that’s how I look to others; like I’m normal and functional, too, when in fact, I feel completely emptied out.

Maybe she’d get a Siamese fighting fish. Or better yet, a ficus tree. God knows a plant would probably be a lot less offended that she ate take-out sushi almost every other night. It was a thought.

It was not the past that broke you. – It was the empty future, the endless string of days filled with none of the people who mattered most.

You swim and you keep swimming without a thought in your head because that’s what you have to do. And you do the push-ups and you jog and you do all the things beyond exhaustion because you have to. Then one day you’ll discover you’re in the zone and you don’t feel your legs anymore, you don’t feel your arms anymore. You exist just as motion. That’s the zone. Then you can do anything.

Quincy, boyfriends apologize, shrinks analyze. Which are you?