No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Here at last is the thing I was made for.

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.

It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.