Based on her experience with men, most assumed that when you talked to them about a problem or dilemma, they were expected to offer an opinion, even when all you wants was for them to listen.

She was sleeping in a quiet bedroom beside her brother, separated only by glass and sand from the young man she loved, a young man who loved her back

As compromised as their marriage might be, part of her still believed in her vows. She loved the man he'd been, and she loved the man she knew he could be.

A good man is hard to find," she said wistfully. "Not everyone is as lucky as you are.

Man and wife were supposed to stay together because they'd made their vows in front of God and family.

I got the sense that he was the kind of person who couldn't hold anger for more than a few minutes, because it just wasn't in him. It could never grow into resentment or bitterness, and I knew then that he was the kind of man who would be married forever. And I decided then and there that I should be the one to marry him.

A woman shaking in fear from demons in her mind, and the old man who loves her more deeply than life itself, crying softly in the corner, his face in his hands.

Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.

No drowning man can know which drop of water his last breath did stop;...