"My first paying job might have been doing a play, actually. My mom paid me to dress up as a flounder at my sister's 'Little Mermaid' - themed birthday party when I was little."

"This was when it hit him! The thought of losing his entire family in one day suddenly made his heart ache in a way that he didn't think could be possible."

"If her mother had been observing this interaction, she'd tell Clementine she was wrong, that she needed to keep talking, to say everything that was on her mind, to communicate, to leave no possibility for misinterpretation.If her father were here, he'd put his finger to his lips and say, 'Shh.'Clementine settled for two words.'I'm sorry,' she said."

"The famous atheist Christopher Hitchens once declared that ‘You’re expelled from your mother’s uterus as if shot from a cannon, towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks.’ Presumably that was what he had in mind when conceiving his three children."

"Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made."

"She realized that she had naïvely believed that the workings of the world revolved around her and her family. Never before had she acknowledged that somebody else’s life might alter hers."

"Motherhood was a twenty-four-hour-a-day, all-encompassing job. It was the hardest job I ever had. Everything that happened to you [her child] happened to me. I had once heard children described in a novel as 'hostages to fortune' and certainly my happiness depended on yours."