When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.

Tibby cried into her soup when it finally came. "I'm scared... ," she told it. The carrots and peas made no reply, but she felt better for having told them.

She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.

It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.

It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.

Exactly! We run or we lose ourselves in something, somebody, anything to try and ease our pain.

some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.