The point of a maze is to find its centre. The point of a labyrinth is to find your centre. Unknown

I met a tiny frail nun once, in Australia, while walking along a harbor, and we got to talking. She said no one defeats cancer; cancer is a dance partner you don’t want and don’t like, but you have to dance, and either you die or the cancer fades back into the darkness at the other end of the ballroom. Brian Doyle

But I can try, as I’ve been trained to, to attach myself to a hope, always too fragile to speak aloud, that we all might one day eventually be – in some tattered, transfigured way – OK. Chris Adrian

Too often when a friend is grieving, we focus on ourselves. Desperate to fix her pain after the death of a loved one, we ask how she is, hoping to inspire a positive response with the tone of our voice or an encouraging look.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. Louise Erdrich