Close to Home (Tracy Crosswhite, #5)

by Robert Dugoni

Moving forward doesn’t mean forgetting the past. Moving forward means doing something about the past.

don’t worry about something that hasn’t happened yet.

Hope became something to cling to when there was nothing else but despair.

“My back will give me a lifetime of torment. The pain will never go away. The doctors said I had to learn to live with it. They wouldn’t prescribe me any more pills. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live in pain every hour of every day?”

Uhhh, yeah. Yeah I do. Thanks for asking.

Color is a fact of life, Del. The people who say they don’t see color, or race, are the people who do. We see good-looking people and funny people, obnoxious people. Why shouldn’t we see something so obvious as color?”

“In time, though, you learn how to live with the pain. You learn how to live with all the memories, and you learn not to fear them. You learn to embrace them, to welcome them.”

“It isn’t going to be better, Maggie. It’s going to be different, and different is okay. You just have to learn how to embrace it. Like anything, it takes time. What you have to realize is that crying is God’s way of helping us wash away the pain. So don’t you ever apologize for crying; it’s a reminder to us all that we’re human, and that we love our family with our entire being. And that’s a beautiful thing.”

“If you go in thinking you’re going to lose, you’ve already lost. If you go in thinking you’re going to win, you’ll be disappointed if you lose. So just go in to the competition with the attitude that you’re going to compete, which is all you can control anyway.”