"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better."

—Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

"Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb. The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story — of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you — and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something is missing.

That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.

Whatever adoption is, it isn't an instant family — not with the adoptive parents, and not with the rediscovered parents. … Adoption is so many things at once. And it is everything and nothing.

—Jeanette Winterson, How can you be Happy, When you can be Normal?

I sent my remorse on a road trip, a wanderjahr of self-discovery. Hitchhiking through some verdant hills, it got a ride with a long-distance trucker. They ate cheeseburgers and fries at an all-night diner and talked about failed relationships. My remorse said it never stopped thinking about water under the bridge, and who was the bridge and who the water. The trucker confided that he googled his exes from time to time. Together they regretted their dismal meal as they sped down the black macadam in the black night with their black thoughts. After what felt like a very short time my remorse returned home wanderlust sated, grateful for the new sorrows it had acquired. I thought it had gained weight but tactfully I said nothing.

—Lisa Rapppoport

Words from Maya Angelou's
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

"Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse."

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity."

"Women been gittin' pregnant ever since Eve ate that apple."

"I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss"

Words from Thomas Lynch,
a Michigan funeral director and poet

"Mourning is romance in reverse. If you love, you grieve, and there are no exceptions, only those who do it well and those who don't."

"I am Catholic in the way that you can't not be a Catholic once you are. I describe myself as a devoutly lapsed Catholic because I have so many questions, but the questions wouldn't even form unless I'd been given this language of Catholicism, which is an advantage."