Sara

“But Rose, for all her incalculable wisdom, was still a dog, and we could not reassure her that something really hideous wasn’t about to happen. Maybe she did think that, behind the door of examination room number three, an enormous, drooling animal was waiting to chew her up. She vibrated with fear, tucking her head down and her hindquarters in until she was the size of a grapefruit. How could I explain that this was all for the good, that I would never leave her here, that I would protect her with the same ferocity with which she protects me from the UPS truck?”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“She was loyal and brave and as smart as a treeful of owls. By explaining her talents and legions of virtues, though, I would not be making my point, which is that the death of my dog hit me harder than the deaths of many people I have known, and this can’t be explained away by saying how good she was. She was. But what I was feeling was something else entirely. I came to realize in the months following Rose’s death, months that I referred to myself as being in the ditch, that there was between me and every person I had ever loved some element of separation, and I had never seen it until now. There had been long periods spent apart from the different people I loved, due to nothing more than circumstances. There had been arguments and disappointments, for the most part small and easily reconciled, but over time people break apart, no matter how enormous the love they feel for one another is, and it is through the breaking and the reconciliation, the love and the doubting of love, the judgment and then the coming together again, that we find our own identity and define our relationships. Except that I had never broken from Rose. I had never judged her or wanted her to be different, never wished myself free from her for a single day.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for. (”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Will she ever understand this? Who knows. Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix