Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are on the earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.
And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushed too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to apples falling around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
— Louise Erdrich in The Painted Drum opens in a new tab
