any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.

There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.

Did I say that she was beautiful? I was wrong. Beauty is too tame a notion; it evokes only faces in magazines. A lovely eloquence, a calming symmetry; none of that describes this woman’s face. So perhaps I should assume I cannot do it justice with words. Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you’d been before.

In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.

No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.