“Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.”

“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”

“Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.”

“Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.”

“The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.”

“It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”

“Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.”