How many others suffered in silence, too ashamed and too afraid to speak about their pain? The world wouldn't let them grieve for children they had aborted. How could they when the rhetoric said there was no child? How does one grieve what doesn't exist? No one wanted to admit the truth.

We grieve for those we've lost, but it's the living that cause us the most pain....

Good friend, we all hurt for her. But her suffering will bring about God's purpose, and you will see it.

So many times you've given me comfort and forgetfulness.

Paul heard his mother's grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief , he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

Being given the honorary rank of brat is the armed services' way of saying thank you to us kids for having grit too. They understand that when one member of a family joins the military, the whole family bears the weight of their service.

You're going to get hurt yourself, and badly, if you take everything so hard.

There're a lot of things you don't understand. Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didn't seem worth it. It wasn't you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Ma's death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it

Why is it, she wondered, that things that hurt people make them deeper and more understanding?

God doesn't plan the horrors. They happen. But God can come into them.

You know when you cut yourself really badly, it doesn't hurt for a while. You don't feel anything. Death- our reaction to death- is sort of like that. You don't feel anything at all. And then, later on, you begin to hurt.