Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due. - Richard Ford

What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well;manage not to be a cynic through it all;...
to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good,even if the good is not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try.

Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

(My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything — a marriage, a conversation, a government — as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.)