the sorrows God sent us brought comfort and strength with them, while the sorrows we brought on ourselves, through folly or wickedness, were by far the hardest to bear.

I'm glad I never had any children,' said Cousin Sarah. 'If they don't break your heart in one way they do it in another.' 'Isn't it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up?' queried Valancy. 'Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain.

And yet... you wouldn't want it to stop hurting... you wouldn't want to forget your little mother even if you could.

She'd been real melancholy in the fall — religious melancholy — it ran in her family. Her father worried so much over believing that he had committed the unpardonable sin that he died in the asylum.

It's all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it's not so nice when you really come to have them

God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

Does God care if I'm sad? Look at the tear-streaked face of Jesus as he stands near Lazarus's tomb.

From Russia I didn't bring out a single happy memory, only sad, tragic ones. The nightmare of pogroms, the brutality of Cossacks charging young Socialists, fear, shrieks of terror.

God's goodness is not a cosmic force but a specific act of compassion. We do not know it as it is but as it happens. To mention an example, "Rabbi Meir said: When a human being suffers what does the Shechinah say? My head is too heavy for Me; My arm is too heavy for Me. And if God is so grieved over the blood of the wicked that is shed, how much more so over the blood of the righteous.

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate. 

Grief was a vicious parasite. It had dug and clawed its way into my heart, feeding off the guilt raging through me. But I'd find a way to exterminate it.