"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."

"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."

"It’s such a relief to know these are universal truths for so many of us in the adoption triad. Gosh, how much easier things could have been for you, for me, and your folks, if literature like this had been around, say, five, ten years ago, when we could’ve all really used it."

"At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes."

"You don't have a mommy,' Gunnar proclaimed as he walked around Breccan. 'Ok, I want my surrogate,' Breccan said as he sped up to catch the other men. Darius came forward to walk in step beside Wharick and whispered in a discreet tone, 'Please, let me kill him."

"One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can't help but think of the good times we're having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c'mon now honey."

"My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?' and I'm like, 'I am a doctor!' and she's all, 'No, I mean a real doctor.' She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache."

"My mother smiled. 'I knew my baby wasn't like that.'I looked at her. 'Like what?'Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.' She paused. 'I knew you'd decide to be all right again."