“Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustnt shirk it. Love, after all, 'hopeth all t...”

“Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because th...”

“Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, ...”

“In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It w...”

“I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And ...”

“And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.”

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”

“Its bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys games and work and manners!”

“Only time can heal your broken heart. Just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs.”

“work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it.”

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”

“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.”