Deciding you should get divorced because you've run out of love is like deciding you should sell your car because it has run out of gas. No reasonable person would ever do that. You simply put more gas in your car and go on. If your marriage "love low" light comes on, pull over and start putting love back into your marriage. Once you've filled it back up, then you can go on.

In my view, it was no accident that Nelson Mandela was chosen by God to lead the people of South Africa. There are very few people who could be imprisoned, kept away from their family and loved ones, and exit that same prison with such a powerful spirit of love and a desire for reconciliation.

What the mind don't 'member, the heart still know. Love, the strongest thang of all. Stronger than all the rest.

I learned that you need not be born into a family to be loved by one.

I wrote about the rush of love, the changing of a woman into a mother—a process that happened without conscious thought, as if the heart knew what the mind and body took time to learn. Love is the one thing that matters. That makes everything else matter. That makes everything worthwhile.

We all have scars. It's when you're honest about them that you find the people who will love you in spite of your nicks and dents. Perhaps even because of them. The people who don't. These people aren't the ones for you.

What the mind don't 'member, the heart still know. Love, the strongest thang of all.

I don't want someone who's just with me until things get a little too difficult, or something better comes along, or marriage isn't as much fun as it used to be. I want the real thing-for better or worse, rich, poor, sickness, health, forever and ever, amen.

No matter how much you want to cut your family out of your heart, you can't. The bond is born when you are born, like an organ in your body. There is no surgery to remove it. When it is diseased, you live with a dull ache telling you that something inside you is not right.

Tightening my fingers, I held on. "Honey, the farther you go in life, the more you realize that most people aren't trying to hurt anybody. They're just trying to . . . get by. People don't always make the right decisions—even the people we love. I know Jake loves us. He's just trying to . . . find his way right now.

You only have to have two loves in your life: for God, and for the person in front of you at any particular time.

Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar.