At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone.

The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.

If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke.

nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term; the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it. And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them.

Once you love something, you can never stop loving it. Even after a divorce, the heart will not stop loving.

A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.