In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.

... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.

For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?