It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.

It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.

Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pears to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.