“Men,” she said as she took my arm and led me to the brightly lit room. “They forget we need to see the outcome of pain before we willingly put ourselves through it. How else would we suffer nine months to have a beautiful child? We already know we have guts.”
“If we could see a graph of how much pain and limitation we cause in our own lives through the lies we tell ourselves, we would immediately eliminate this nasty habit.”
“We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.”
“Where we belong is often where we least expect to find ourselves—a place that we may have willed ourselves to forget, but that the heart remembers forever.”
“How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?”
“ONE AFTERNOON DURING THAT FINAL SPRING, AFTER SHE HAD TURNED THIRTY AURA TURNED TO ME FROM HER DESK WHILE I LAY ON THE BED READING, AND SHE SAID, 'WE HAVE EVERYTHING WE NEED TO BE HAPPY. WE DONT HAVE TO BE RICH. WE CAN GET JOBS IN THE UNIVERSITIES IF WE NEED THEM. WE HAVE OUR BOOKS, OUR READING, OUR WRITING, AND WE HAVE EACH OTHER, FRANK. WE DONT NEED MORE TO BE HAPPY, WE ARE SO LUCKY. DO YOU KNOW HOW LUCKY WE ARE?”