Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up

It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.

I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.
Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up- as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is. You would assume that, given everything, I saw this coming. But watching Kate watch this boy, I see I have a thousand things to learn.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.