Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.

The point is that our body's core regulatory systems can be altered by traumatic experiences. A child exposed to unpredictable or extreme stress will become what we call dysregulated.

The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one's heart to stone.

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.

sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it

The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world's sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

The elevation of grief to a status transcending that which it sorrows.

That the deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures.

He thought perhaps if he dreamt of him enough he'd go away forever and be dead among his kind

It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift