You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.

...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.

Either things grow and change or they die.

His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.