Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of the flesh, these are signs, these are the things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.

Part of the life she should have had is just a gap, it isn't there, it's nothing.

She was something of his own that he had lost.

A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What

Grief's darkness fades in the sunlight of thanksgiving.

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes; when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That's relativity.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Our little time of suffering is not worthy of our first night's welcome home to Heaven.

There is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain which death does not remove.

I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

At such moments I don't think about all the misery, but about the beauty that still remains. This is where Mother and I differ greatly. Her advice in the face of melancholy is: Think about all the suffering in the world and be thankful you're not part of it. My advice is: Go outside, to the country, enjoy the sun and all nature has to offer. Go outside and try to recapture the happiness within yourself; think of all the beauty in yourself and in everything around you and be happy.

When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.