Attempted Love

“You’ll get over it…” It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”

– Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“Was it hard?” I ask.
Letting go?”

Not as hard as holding on to something that wasn’t real.”

– Lisa Schroeder

“The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.”

– W. Somerset Maugham