Even in times when it's difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art - and books - always help

I was beginning to understand.My grandmother's love was cold because she was afraid of things;that was why everything had to be perfect.

No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.

The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her - she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don't.

Just because something is unspoken doesn't mean that it disappears.