“She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful & life was so short.”

“They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful. Because now she looks so—bad. ”

“...I met a reverend mother once who cried...ah, it's all so sad' - 'What did she cry about?' - 'I don't know, after talking to me, I remember I said some silly thing like "the universe is a woman because it's round" but I think she cried because she was remembering her early days when she had a romance with some soldier who died, at least that's what they say, she was the greatest woman I ever saw, big blue eyes, big smart woman ... you could do that, get out of this awful mess and leave it all behind”

“She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.”

“At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.”

“She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all.”