She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous str ands, appreciating its subtle

nuances. She was a prism through which sadness cou ld be divided into its infinite spectrum. ? Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happine ss. I think and think and think, I ve thought myself out of happiness one million times , but never once into it. Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothi ng is beautiful and true. It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss. Songs are as sad as the listener. The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert reme mberer. She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save h er. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. If nothing matters, there's nothing to save. There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buri ed them, and let them hurt me. Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. She had been in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love, but rather doing something much more ordinary It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with co nversations we weren't having.