and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan. - Khaled Hosseini

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion — like the phantom pain of an amputee.