She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.

We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.

She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

From personal experience, I completely agree that it is often easier to go for monotone sadness. When I was starting out, I wrote a gazillion short stories that ran the gamut of human suffering - drug addiction, child abuse, terminal illness, loved ones dying by all manner of misfortune, etc. In hindsight, it's clear that I mistook the power of the situation for the power of the story.

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.