This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow/traveler.

Be a good girl, she said. I hope you'll be a good sister to Laura. I know you try to be. I nodded. I didn't know what to say. I felt I was the victim of an injustice: why was it always me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other way around? Surely my mother loved Laura more than she loved me.

Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms.

He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which.

You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

My father prayed because he had a good friend with whom to share the problems of the day.

God gives us love! Something to love He lends us; but when love is grown To ripeness, that on which it throve Falls off, and love is left alone: This is the curse of time.

May this be the year that things go your way most of the time, and when they don't, may you have great friends to lean on.