Kindness And Intelligence Don't Always Deliver Us

Grief Does Not End And Love Does Not Die And Nothing Fills Its Graven Place. With Grace, Pain Is Transmuted Into The Gold Of Wisdom And Compassion And The Lesser Coin Of Muted Sadness And Resignation; But Something Leaden Of It Remains, To Become The Kernel Arond Which More Pain Accretes (a Black Pearl): One Pain Becomes Every Other Pain ... Unless One Strips Away, One By One, The Layers Of Pain To Get To The Heart Of The Pain - And This Causes More Pain, Pain So Intense As To Feel Like Evisceration.

Belief Sometimes Precedes Understanding; Faith Sometimes Precedes Scientific Evidence.

Kindness And Intelligence Don't Always Deliver Us From The Pitfalls And Traps: There Are Always Failures Of Love, Of Will, Of Imagination. There Is No Way To Take The Danger Out Of Human Relationships.

It's The Perpetually Unfinished Quality Of Housework That Makes It Oppressive - It Never Ends, Like Bad Psychoanalysis, Or A Dream Interrupted. It Is Paradoxically True That It Is Exactly This Daily Re-creation Of The World That Lends Housekeeping Its Nobility And Romance.

There Is Something Worse Than Dying, And That Is Humiliation - At Least So It Seemed To Me.