Grief is a gift, something you have to earn.

The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.

I have sat in the dark and looked at them both, the child and the woman. And the feeling has become too much. It is not sorrow or joy; it is the weight and the pressure of having been brought into their lives, and of knowing that if one were ever to be separated from them, it would mean your obliteration.

If you want to support others you have to stay upright yourself.

When my mother didn't come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left. You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.

She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.

..That's where we humans make a mistake. We don't see the utterly amazing when it comes to us disguised as the ordinary.