suffering

Let her, if she will, forgive him her own suffering, her own extreme anguish as a mother, but she has no right to forgive the suffering of her mutilated child; even if the child himself forgives, she has no right! And if that is so, if the right to forgive does not exist, then where is harmony?

I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me. Job 7:3

There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.

I immediately came to this conclusion myself when I searched the news archives and found nothing except for the short Village Voice obituary. But I was reluctant to test this theory out loud because I knew that I, as an Asian woman saying it, would be dismissed as being conspiratorial.

What if sadness is the secret to everything?

Hurting people not only does not change them, it is never called for.

You have suffered enough. If you can make it easier, make it easier, and don’t feel guilty about it.

The obscenity of humanity is that we often seek heaven to find hell.

The bewilderment seemed to grow and for a moment she saw his true face, the one he ordinarily kept so well hidden, and it was a face of desperate unhappiness, the face of an animal caught in a snare beyond its ability to decipher and render harmless.