RAGE AT EVERYTHING.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

“Quiet people spend a lot of their time in large social interactions observing others. While others are doing all the talking you’re sitting there listening, taking it all in, and making small mental notes about the people around you.”

“We are always trying to convert people to a belief in our own explanation of the universe. We think that the more people there are who believe as we do, the more certain it will be that what we believe is the truth. But it doesn’t work that way at all.”

We are all waundering souls filled with love, constantly looking for someone else to give it to.

“Either this stripped down solitude or the storm of love–nothing else in the world interests me. Have I forgotten anything? I don’t think so. As usual I finish the day before the sea, sumptuous this evening beneath the moon, which writes Arab symbols with phosphorescent streaks on the slow swells. There is no end to the sky and the waters. How well they accompany sadness!”

“Camus’s own life could be understood as a response to his mother’s–his ambitions as a reaction to her docility and his tireless activism as engendered by her passivity–for it was in almost every way his antithesis. Camus knew this. He dedicated The First Man, the first of the books he intended to write about love, to the widow Camus, “to you who will never be able to read this book.””

“I was aware that the sun was sinking behind me, golden in the October afternoon.”

“Nothing is better for the soul than to make another soul less sad.”

“Hands are unbearably beautiful. They hold on to things. They let things go.”

“no other word makes my mouth as tender as your name.”

“The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love.”