“I didn't emerge from the cocoon of my past to become an uninhibited, emotionally healthy butterfly. Nothing is ever that easy. Sometimes grief is a comfort we grant ourselves because it's less terrifying than trying for joy. Nobody wants to admit it. We'd all declare we want to be happy, if we could. So why, then, is pain the one thing we most often hold on to? Why are slights and griefs the memories on which we choose to dwell? Is it because joy doesn't last but grief does?”

“Sometimes grief is a comfort we grant ourselves because it's less terrifying than trying for joy. Nobody wants to admit it. We'd all declare we want to be happy, if we could. So why, then, is pain the one thing we most often hold on to? Why are slights and griefs the memories on which we choose to dwell? Is it because joy doesn't last but grief does?”

“It is painful to remember what and who we've lost, but it's also comforting. Grief can become its own comfort...the moment when grief itself overtakes the one grieved. When they become one and the same, so that we fear grief's retreat as much as we feared the beloved's passing.”

“It was heartfelt, it was heartbreaking. It was extreme joy, it was bone-crushing grief. It was fiery hot, it was icy-cold. It was true love sprouting... it was true love dying.It's like we were both trying to hold onto something that was slipping through our fingers, and we didn't understand why.”

“We ourselve are the authors of almost all our woes and griefs, of which we so unreasonably complain.”

“There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.”