“But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It’s a mystery. Always startled to find I’ve survived.”

“…but the truth is I am terribly weak. And I crave the balm of beautiful and soft things.”

“But the paradox of love is perhaps the same as that of art, which Jeanette Winterson so elegantly termed “the paradox of active surrender” — in order for either to transform us, we must let it turn us over and inside-out. That is what Rilke called love’s great exacting claim, and in that claim lies its ultimate reward.”

My favorite grocery store cashier died a few months ago. I know this probably sounds like a bizarre thing to be sad about. Her name was Judith and I only saw her once or twice a week, and only while I was paying for groceries. But even now, months later, I think of her when I'm at the grocery store. She used to save the ends of receipt paper rolls when they only had a foot or two left on them and give them to me, which I never asked her to do, but the first time she did it she held one out to me and said "you look like someone who would make a craft out of this," and I laughed because she was right. I do save them to put in geocaches and letterboxes. Our small talk was about the weather and the weekend and aren't those cookies good? They're so expensive though. But it's worth it.