Broken for You

Less is less. Heartbreak is heartbreak. You think I'm sitting here gloating. Telling myself that my suffering beats yours? Hurt is hurt. You don't measure these things.

Her heart was finished. It bore, perhaps, records of life, but it wasn't alive. Too late for decoration. Too late for effects. Further handling could only result in cracks and fractures. People could cut themselves on the edgesof her heart, she was sure of it.

Love? It's when you don't give a thought to all the ifs and want-to's in the world. It's when if all the fires of hell were between you, you'd walk in them gladly to be with him, and sing with joy at your own burnin' if only his kiss was on your mouth.

The broken are not always gathered together,of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of "senseless tragedies" but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Childeren are killed. Madamen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessy mourned. loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; Over roads new printed with their foot steps,the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities people with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stuberness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. we can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.

She soon learned, though, that giving weight to other people's opinions was creative nihilism; it was like being banished from the Land of No Words and exiled to the Land of All Bullshit.

Sometimes a person can say I’m sorry a thousand times and that glue will never dry.

If God exists, He is there, in the small, cast-off pieces, rough and random and no two alike.

He was shorter than an average eight-year-old boy but exceptionally tall for a tulip.

But in dying so suddenly her mother had become a riddle at the gate instead of the road you walked to get there.

The Book put forth the theory that what a person envisions is what a person attracts, so that if you envision loss, despair, loneliness, etc., that is indeed what will befall you. The Book also claimed that all of us lie to ourselves all the time, so why not tell positive lies—known as “affirmations”—instead of negative ones?

Loss is loss. Heartbreak is heartbreak. You think I’m sitting here gloating. Telling myself that my suffering beats yours? Hurt is hurt. You don’t measure these things.

extras, in case you want to send some.” “Irma,” M.J. said. “Who am I going to write a postcard to? You’re the