You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion. Pg.8
That’s the paradox of loss: How can something that’s gone weigh us down so much? – Pg. 11
Although there was nothing written on the page, I pulled word after word from my core, like silk for a spider’s web, spinning a make-believe life. That’s why we read fiction, isn’t it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we’re not the only ones?
The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed.. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers. What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn’t the only word that fails. Hate does, too.- Pg, 357
…I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds. I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for – even if it’s just a better tomorrow – is the most powerful drug on this planet. – Pg. 373
