Erin Klinar

“But then you feel yourself growing stronger in that bed, as if you’re squeezing the tears out of yourself, wringing yourself dry of pain. You imagine yourself bleeding grief, as if the water from your eyes is the pain itself. You imagine it leaving your body and being soaked up by the mattress. You wake up one morning feeling dry and completely empty, so empty that if someone knocked on you, you’d sound hollow. Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay. Empty feels like a beginning. Which is nice, because for so long you have felt like you were at the end.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves

“Maybe, in the end, that’s all that love was—doing the hard thing. Not roses and valentines and walks on the beach, but simply being present, day after ordinary day. The extraordinary romanticism of ordinary life.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“Then it occurs to me that I haven’t been away from Ana for a few weeks. I’ve been away from her since Ben died. I let myself die when he did.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Forever, Interrupted

“You know that you will never truly be free of the grief. You know that it is something you must learn to live with, something you manage. You start to understand that grief is chronic. That it’s more about remission and relapse than it is about a cure. What that means to you is that you can’t simply wait for it to be over. You have to move through it, like swimming in an undertow.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves