Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that,
and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you
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 you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.
Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.― Louise Erdrich