I am not sure what lonliness is," she said. "If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone." "What do you fear then?" he asked her. She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words. "Never finding myself again.

Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.

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.

My happiness has to come from within myself or it is too fragile a thing to be of any use to me and too much of a burden to benefit any of my loved ones.

A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.

But parents, she supposed, were not the pinnacle of perfection their children thought or expected them to be. They were humans who usually did the best they could but often made the wrong choices.

I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.