Nineteen Minutes

by Jodi Picoult

You couldn’t fight the injustice of fate; you could only suffer it and hope that one day it might be different.

one person’s trauma is another’s loss of innocence.

What she hadn’t realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you’d felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.

Maybe it was our own damn fault that men turned out the way they did, Selena thought. Maybe empathy, like any unused muscle, simply atrophied.