Those who understand us enslave something in us.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

But my heart is an old house (the kind my mother grew up in) hell to heat and cool and faulty in the wiring and though it’s nice to look at I have no business inviting lovers in.

The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment. To ignore this fact, or to pretend that it is not so, is to put on emotional blinkers which leave us unprepared for the losses that will inevitably occur in our own lives and unprepared to help others cope with losses in theirs