Libby Segal

“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés 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

“To love is to willingly lower our defenses, a terrifying prospect any time and place but especially so at a time and in a place where we perceive ourselves as having so much (HIV; violence; social; cultural; environmental degradation) to defend ourselves against. To love is to give oneself to another, to entrust to someone else a power that all good sense would have us reserve to ourselves. So we give away some part of ourselves, to find that part returned to us tenfold, in ways we could never have predicted and cannot rationally understand. Loaves and fishes. Miracles happen.”
― Fenton Johnson, Geography of the Heart: A Memoir

“Love is like a ripe peach. You take it when and where you find it, there's no point in letting it sit around. If you're lucky to come across it, you'd better enjoy it right then and there.”
― Fenton Johnson, Geography of the Heart: A Memoir

“Whoever you are, some evening take a step out of your house, which you know so well. Enormous space is near.”
― Michael Crichton, Travels