For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives - to both, but perhaps especially to the woman - a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

For in grief nothing ‘stays put.‘

Still, there‘s no denying that in some sense, “I feel better,”and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one‘s unhappiness…We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job.

You can‘t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.

Thought is never static; pain often is.

This is one of the things I‘m afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subsided into boredom tinged by faint nausea?

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn‘t seem worth starting anything. I can‘t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of H.? That is not happening already? Slowly, quietly, like snowflakes — like the small flakes that come when it‘s going to snow all night - little flakes of me, my impressions l, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery‘s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don‘t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It may be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once.

Risk taking is not free, but I can assure you, it‘s worth it.

He forgets that he was someone‘s dream once, himself.

I can‘t speak. Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

It‘s like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone.

I rub the indents in my wrists where the handcuffs squeezed…

River held out his hands to the dogs like he was a reverend and they were his church. They were quiet with listening, but he didn‘t say anything. Something about the way they froze together in the blue dawn was worshipful.

I know it by the way he holds the little sick golden girl: as if he thinks he could curl around her, make his skeleton and flesh into a building to protect her from the adults, from the great reach of the sky, the vast expanse of the grass-ridden earth, shallow with graves. He protects as River protects. I want to tell him this: Boy, you can‘t.

But I resented her when I was young, resented her for the lessons and the misplaced hope. And later, for still believing in good in a world that cursed her with cancer, that twisted her limp as an old dry rag and left her to disintegrate.

She said them words as though decisions have no consequences, when, of course, it‘s been easier for her.

He was just tall enough that when he hugged me, his chin rested on my head, and I was cupped under him.

Women‘s work is never easy, never clean.

Maybe that‘s what it means to be in love, to willingly be at the mercy of another person.

If you were to ask me what it smelled like, I couldn‘t answer any more than you would know what to say if someone asked you to describe the fragrance of coffee. It was the scent of my mother and it couldn‘t be broken down into parts.

You don‘t know what you need until somebody gives it to you exactly the way you need it gave.

When she gives a song, it isn‘t entertaining; rather, it sounds like she is telling secrets that are not hers to reveal.

I‘m not sure if she even realized it herself, but she‘s the kind of woman who will never belong to anyone.

In my mind, I picture us at our same kitchen table, in our same comfortable house, passing quiet words of truth.

Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.

But this is what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn‘t simply empty, our home has been emptied.

He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso and finally through his mouth.

...I felt blessed in the old-fashioned sense, in a way that anyone would be in finding someone whose smell you enjoyed.

Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator.

They teach you growing up that you are only one thing at a time — angry, lonely, content — but he‘s never found that to be true. He is a dozen things at once. He is lost and scared and grateful, he is sorry and happy and afraid.

And this, he decides, is what a good-bye should be. Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up. It is a door left open. It is drifting off to sleep.

And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years or pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”

She has kissed a lot of people. But none of them will ever kiss like him. The difference doesn‘t lie in the technicalities. His mouth is no better shapes to the task. It is just in the way he uses it.

Greatness requires sacrifice. Who you sacrifice to matters less than what you sacrifice for.

Here is a new kind of silence, rarer than the rest. The easy quiet of familiar spaces, of places that fill simply because you are not alone within them.

It is such a grand word, soul. Like god, like time, like space, and when she‘s tried to picture it, she‘s conjured images of lightning, or sunbeams through dust, of storms in the shapes of human forms, of vast and edgeless white.

For years, she will lie awake and tell herself stories of the girl she‘d been, in hopes of holding fast to every fleeting fragment, but it will have the opposite effect — the memories like talismans, too often touched; like saint‘s coins, the etching worn down to silver plate and faint impressions.

Teaching is an extension of learning, a way to be a perpetual student.

She moves among the books as if they‘re friends. And perhaps, in a way, they are.

How could anyone forget this girl, when she takes up so much space? She fills the room with stories, with laughter, with warmth and light.

Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people‘s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.

The darkness claimed he‘d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.

Estele used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.

What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided - a memory, a photograph, a name.

Teachers who say they are deeply concerned about social justice or that they “love all children” but cannot say the words “Black Lives Matter” have no real understanding of what social justice is and what it truly means to love, find joy, and appreciate their students and their students‘ culture.