It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too..

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part..

the territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace..

I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice..

You can’t change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn’t make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. W….

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world ….

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogu….

The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of inten….

The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty..

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation..

Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I….

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of inno….

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it..

the mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her..

If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they cr….

memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain..

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive..

The flaw is the thing we love..

Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear..

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days..

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her..