Life will break you. No one can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, because loneliness will also break you with its longing. You have to love. You have to feel it. He is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You’re here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or wounded, or death brushes too close, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tried as many as you could.
— Louise Erdrich