“I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.”

“But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,All losses are restored and sorrows end.”

“It almost contradicts itself," she says after a moment. "It's as if there is love and loss at the same time, together in a kind of beautiful pain.”

“She felt so much emotionally, she would say, that a physical outlet - physical pain - was the only way to make her internal pain go away. It was the only way she could control it.”

“I was going to rise, do some typing and coffee drinking in the kitchen all day since at that time work, work was my dominant thought, not love- not the pain which impels me to write this even while I don't want to, the pain which won't be eased by writing of this but heightened, but which will be redeemed, and if only it were a dignified pain and could be placed somewhere other than this black gutter of shame and loss and noisemaking folly in the night... /The Subterraneans”

“in the caves of my heart, where pain taps out its rhythms and sorrow sets its loss, i am without direction.”