Little Earthquakes

Every now and then I'll be reading a book or a story, and I'll come across a quote that literally makes me stop what I'm doing to look up and just ponder what it is I've just read, that hits me with such a fierce and knowing wisdom, that seems both so simple and also like such a complex truth that I'm a little dumbfounded for a moment. It's moments like these that really make me cherish literature and realize that sometimes it's not always the big picture, but the small details that really make up life.

Below are two such quotes that I've read recently that I want to share:

If I had been twenty years older, perhaps, I could have explained that nothing is quite as bad as that, that at the end of what is called "the sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love that has accepted everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.
-Graham Greene

I hold his hands. We're here, right here, as the future closes up around us. Something will happen next. Something always does. We live with unspeakable losses, and most of us carry on. We find new lovers, change jobs, move to another state. We continue to know animal pleasures; we eat and have sex, buy new clothes. Hardly anyone is destroyed, I mean truly annihilated, by loss. We're designed for endurance.
-Michael Cunningham