I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are.

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.