Jacquelyn Mitchard quotes:

Anybody can become a widow. There aren't any special qualifications. It happens in less time than it takes to draw a breath. It doesn't require the planning, for example, that it takes to become a wife or a mother or any of the other ritual roles of womanhood.

You'll never regret eating blueberries or working up a sweat.

Feelings change fast when you're a teenager.

our sons and daughters are only passing through. ... If we are lucky, they always will consider our home their harbor, but they are headed out to the open sea, almost from the first.

Nothing better for the hormones and worse for the heart than the right boy at the right time.

Friendship for me is made from a tapestry of personalities, each of whom shares a part of all I care about.

It's faith that really takes the courage, the belief in things unseen.

Cats regard people as warm-blooded furniture.

The ideal structure for a family is one that remains so.

Work is a slice of your life. It's not the entire pizza.

When someone you love that much leaves you behind there isn't as much of you left to die when your own time comes.

Here is how it is for women. We become our schedules. That starts to feel good. Then it starts to feel necessary. Then it starts to feel like everything.

Being wanted is the tender heel of everything human.

There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.