Alcoholics don’t have relationships-they take hostages.

Why do our parents have the ability to make us feel like children even when our hair is graying and we have a mortgage that feels like a Third World debt? (135)

Love and pain are not the same. But sometimes it feels like they should be. Love is put to test everyday. Pain is not. Yet the two of them are inseparable because true love cannot bear separation.

Jealousy is a terrible thing. I know all the psychological triggers. The fear of losing control, the fear of loss, the fear of abandonment, neglect and loneliness... But the most destructive thing about jealousy is that it kills what it values - the love you want to save won't survive the constraints of jealousy. There is no entitlement. Love is either equal or a tragedy.

I don't know what else to tell you. I often think how different my life would have been - how much happier - if you'd been a part of it. One day.

Sometimes friends do foolish things. My father told me that true friends are like gold coins. Ships are wrecked by storms and lie for hundreds of years on the ocean floor. Worms destroy the wood. Iron corrodes. Silver turns black but gold doesn't change in sea water. It loses none of its brilliance or colour. It comes up the same. It survives shipwrecks and time.

People think it’s easy to be cynical and pessimistic, but it’s incredibly hard work. It’s much easier to be hopeful.