Suffering itself is beloved: love and suffering are far closer to each other than love and pleasure.

Suffering ignites the spark of contact with the sublime and offers proof of humanity.

Stay in these rooms for years and years, live on forever in a glorious museum.

The word suffering is full and whole and perfect as a pierced heart, sweet, rushing and tender ... Suffering is the joy of someone about to be martyred, illumination of something given up as an offer.

We're so many, we're so hard to distinguish from each other, but we long to be distinguished.

Kate Bernheimer's fiction offers a unique and delicate gift, the tempting mirage of a grace that constantly escapes. The Complete Tales of Merry Gold is an exceptional, lovely book, beautifully enigmatic, speaking a language that mysteriously evokes the unspoken.

We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.