"My heart is broken," she goes. "It's turned to a piece of stone. I'm no good. That's what's as bad as anything, that I'm no good anymore."

She couldn’t beat sense into a stone. Not even when it seemed fun to try.

"Hearts are breakable," Isabelle said. "And I think even when you heal, you're never what you were before".

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

There is those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves is a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman.

At her core, she was broken, and life was just one long attempt to distract people from noticing

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?

As people used to say, “What the heart loves is the cure.” The cure for healing the wounds and conflicts between faiths and systems of belief involves awakening to the unique ways that each heart carries devotion and love. When followed far enough, simple belief can transform into wisdom; raw passions can become a greater compassion that trusts what resides in one’s heart and even in the hearts of others. Until the heart opens and the eyes begin to see there is always the danger of blindness and narrowness and the tendency to hold onto narrow ways of being.

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time? (p. 279)

I broke my soul trying to mend yours.

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable

To argue with a person who has renounced
the use of reason is like administering
medicine to the dead.

Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.

Or — but this more rarely happened — she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.