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

We are each the love of someone's life.

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.

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.

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

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.

No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.