Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.

The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.

The memory of the pain did not destroy the reality of the pleasure; grief did not obliterate joy.

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.

Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.

Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.

Grief,she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.