At the temple there is a poem called “Loss” carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.
Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
He was like a song I’d heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
I don’t know when we’ll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
If you aren’t the woman I think you are, then this isn’t the world I thought it was.
We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.
Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.
If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you’re sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.
Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.
A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.
We can never flee the misery that is within us.