He'd had to go through so many possessions, things that exploded smally with memories over the last few weeks; but it was the opposite with the ashes. He was trying to hold away the fact that they knew nothing of what they were.

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.

Grief is times bailiff sent to evict you from your old life. Its black warrant demands of you hard labour. There can be no escape of reprieve. You must toil laying down the foundation stones of acceptance, stone by stone, until you have paved your way to your new life.

Why is love such a sorrowful thing, this I never could understand; passion and pain are linked together, ever I find them hand in hand.

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your heart
had been saying.