I loved him so much, loved his fearlessness, his strength, even the ambition that would someday take him away from me.

My parents never said it. They thought you shouldn't wear out the words

One of the blessings human beings take for granted is the ability to remember pain without re-feeling it. The pain of the physical wounds is long gone …and the other kind of hurt, the damage done to our spirits, has been healed. We are careful with those scarred places in each other.

A butterfly symbolized acceptance of each new phase in life. To keep faith as everything around you changed.

I have always been an obsessive reader - I remember going back and forth to the local library with stacks of books taller than I was.

I hate you for all the years I 'll have to live without you. How can a heart hurt this much and still go on beating? How can I feel this bad without dying from it? I 've bruised my knees with praying to have you back. None of my prayers have been answered. I tried to send them up to heaven but they 're trapped here on earth, like bobwhites beneath the snow. I try to sleep and it's like I 'm suffocating. Where have you gone? Once you said that if I wasn't with you, it wouldn't be heaven. I can't let go of you. Come back and haunt me. Come back.

Women. You'll interpret anything as love. You see a man wearing an idiotic expression, and you assume he's been struck by Cupid's arrow when in reality, he's digesting a bad turnip.