Quotes from Laurie Frankel

You have to help him unlearn it. You have to help him see that if he's disappearing from the world, that's too high a price to pay for fitting in.

There's nothing good that can come out of a child being sick.

Penn was a student of narrative and knew that lovers should be wooed, relationships fought for, that anything too easily won was soon lost or else not worth winning.

Penn considered how clever it was of him to have birthed a Greek Chorus to hear his tales.

If you wrote your own characters, they didn't disappoint you like real people did. If you told your own story, you got to pick your ending. Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.

That even when what people were waiting for was the worst new of their life or the best, even when the waiting was heavy with implication and consequence, waiting people still transformed into cranky toddlers, impatient and frowning and red-faced infuriated with vending machines that dispensed the wrong thing, and kids who did not use their inside voice.

But by the time those acquaintances became close friends, it was too late. Perhaps there was a perfect moment in between, when you were close enough to tell but not so close it was problematic that you hadn't done so already, but it was infinitesimal, too fleet and fleeting to pin down, visible not even in hindsight.

ispelling fear. Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but by reminding themselves, and everyone else, to choose love, choose openness, to think and be calm. That there were more ways than just two, wider possibilities than hidden or betrayed, stalled or brokenhearted, male or female, right or wrong. Middle ways. Ways beyond.

Some sadness has no remedy. Some sadness you can't make better.

It was like when your car spins out on an icy road, and your senses turn up so high that time seems to slow because you notice everything, and you just sit in your spinning car waiting, waiting to see if you're, going to die. He couldn't loos at her because every sense and every fraction of a moment and every atom of his body was being in love with her. It was weird.

Claude did take a call from Carmelo, whose grandmotherly advice was, "Fuck the bastards,

One thing on your list to worry about. Put all your worry into that one thing. Worry about it as much as you like, as much as you need to. But only that one thing. Anytime any of the other things flits across your mind, take that concern and channel it into your one thing.

So Grumwald felt his way was, if not firmly paved, at least densely pebbled, and that was as good a start as one could wish for.

Dispelling fear. Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but by reminding themselves, and everyone else, to choose love, choose openness, to think and be calm.

Not much of what I value in our lives is easy. But there's not much of it I'd trade for easy either, I don't think.

For my child, for all our children, I want more options, more paths through the woods, wider ranges of normal, and unconditional love. Who doesn't want that?

It was like when your car spins out on an icy road, and your senses turn up so high that time seems to slow because you notice everything, and you just sit in your spinning car waiting, waiting to see if you're going to die. He couldn't look at her because every sense and every fraction of a moment and every atom of his body was being in love with her. It was weird.

At home, there is no middle way. You're male or you're female. There's no in between. You conform or you hide. You conform or you're wrong. If you dress like a girl, then you have to be a girl, all girl, and if any part of you's not, that's not okay.

There's a fork in the road. It seems like there are only two choices. It seems like the task is to figure out which way to go, left or right, forward or back, deeper or safer, but in fact any of those choices is easy compared to the real trick. The real trick is you have to forge your way straight ahead through the trees where there is no path.

This is a medical issue, but mostly it's a cultural issue. It's a social issue and an emotional issue and a family dynamic issue and a community issue.

that was how Penn lost the argument regardless because of course you could uproot a whole family of seven for the needs of just one of them because that's what family means.

tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what's good and right and then to be able to make that happen. You never have enough information. You don't get to see the future. And if you screw up, if with your incomplete, contradictory information you make the wrong call, well, nothing less

Children learn many wonderful things in kindergarten. How to line up for lunch. How to use inside voices. How to not push people. Important life skills for sure. I use them every day myself. But they learn other things too: you have to conform, or people might not like you; you have to be the same because different doesn't feel good. At home, Claude's loved no matter what. At school, it sometimes feels the opposite: you are not loved no matter what.

Grass stain?" "Annoying, probably permanent, essentially harmless. Kind of ugly.