Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love

The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.

It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

You'll always love the person, if you're sensible. But you get a lot of people, especially in divorces and separations, doing a lot of damage to themselves, because they can't figure out that they actually still love this person, but not in their original way.