Stranger

"Angry and half in love with you, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."

“I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience—bring words close to the body—as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.”

I understand your grief; even time does not always heal this kind of pain.

“…memory is strange. I cannot remember his face any longer. What I do recall are fragments in time: the crinkling of his eyes against the sunshine or when he smiled, the ghost of his unrestrained laughter … I am left with pieces of remembering though I loved him whole.”

"Sometimes it is dangerous to revisit a loved book, especially after a great change in one's life: the book no longer seems perfect; one swears it has been altered or edited, when in fact it is, of course, oneself who has been revised."

“May I love the Giver more than the gift.”

Make The Most Of Laylatul al-Qadr

“I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I always wanted to be alone.”