The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.

But only a person in the depths of despair neglected to look beyond winter to the spring that inevitably followed, bringing back color and life and hope.

Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.

Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?

But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.

There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.

Life, she realized, so often became a determined, relentless avoidance of pain-of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain had to be acknowledged and even touched so that one could move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it.