There are places I cannot visit. Places of unbearable sadness, grief, mourning. They say places are made by people. I say places are defined by the memories they conjure—the lunge of a curse, a shared and shattered history, a loved one drowned and lost in the ocean of forgetting.
Il tempo addolcisce i ricordi più amari, hanno detto in tanti. Io continuo ad essere convinto che non stessero ascoltando Sad eyed lady of the lowlands.
Oh, sometimes I think it is of no use to make friends. They only go out of your life after awhile and leave a hurt that is worse than the emptiness before they came.
Mrs. Norris had been talking to her the whole way from Northampton of her wonderful good fortune, and the extraordinary degree of gratitude and good behaviour which it ought to produce, and her consciousness of misery was therefore increased by the idea of its being a wicked thing for her not to be happy.
Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will.
The trick. . .is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary.
What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.