She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.

And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love".

What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.

What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?

Sadness of love without release.