Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here 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 brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around in heaps, wasting their sweetness.
Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

Louise Edrich