"Can experience and suffering not be used to enrich one's life rather than deaden or impoverish it? He asked."
"No time is really wasted unless one never learns the lessons it offers."
"Perhaps in recognizing how one ought not to live, one can learn how to live."
"We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are now two of us the same."
"They all had burdens they would carry for the rest of their lives even though they had learned to live with them and even find happiness again."
"One can accept and move forward, trying to keep ones new life as similar to the old as it can possibly be. One can deny reality and carry on regardless. One can hide away and close one's mind to what has happened. Or one can step out and explore the new reality, try to make sense of it, try to begin life again almost as thought one had been newly born."
"The loneliness, the sense of abandonment, the feeling of worthlessness, the total absence of roots... But it was not the time to think of any of that. It was never time. Such thoughts only spiraled downward into darkness. One had to deal with reality in one's everyday life and find daily blessings for which to be thankful."
"It feels a bit shameful to be suffering, does it not? As though one must have done something to deserve it. Or as if one were admitting to some weakness of character at being unable to shake it off the hurt. But hiding it, one can turn to marble with nothing but hollowness inside - an unacknowledged pain."
"We have a habit, do we not, of thinking happiness is a future state if only this and that condition can be met? And so much of life passes us by without our realizing how happy we can be in this present moment, or how nearly happy."
And they have somehow a healing effect as well.
