Parenthood is the only career in which the better you do your job, the sooner you’re fired.

Oh, child. The best thing is to know. I always tell ’em, best to be who you is. What you is deep down inside. Ain’t no other good way of livin’.

The thing about so many of the kids here – country kids, town kids, a sad majority of these kids – is that their norm is constant drama, constant escalation. Conversations start, grow louder, get ugly, get personal.

Happiness doesn’t grow where impatience grazes.

Nothing takes you from thirty years old to thirteen faster than your mother’s voice rebounding up the stairs like a tennis ball after a forehand slice.

Our schedules are always filled with other things.

How wonderful the days when all was well. How necessary, also, that we must release them now. It is fine enough to glance at the past, but one must never focus there overlong. Don’t you think?

Mother told me,” he sighs. “She’d been over to Drayden Hill to get a baby fix, since your sister and Courtney and the boys are visiting. Now she’s on the grandkid kick again.” Elliot is understandably frustrated. “She reminded me that I’m thirty-one already, and she’s fifty-seven, and she doesn’t want to be an old grandmother.

My story begins on a sweltering August night, in a place I will never set eyes upon.

The funny thing about having people believe good things about you is that, without even realizing it, you want to make those things true.