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He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't hav...more

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You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.

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Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that hap...more

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When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

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In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing...more

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How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

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I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leave...more

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But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperatel...more

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It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then ...more

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Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

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While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between t...more

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Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.

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The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.

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Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

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A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest ...more