Beth Kephart quotes:

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.

You aren't happy, Estela says.I can't be happy, I say.Look at me, Kenzie.I'm looking at you, Estela.Do you know your own heart?I don't know anything.Go, she says, and think. And don't come back until you know.

Forgiveness, which is the place that every story turns, the chance we give each other.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

How do you know when an apology is trueâ??when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?

I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.

Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives.

We grow too old to lose old friends ...

In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.

Nothing erodes [a mother's love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.