Exceptional Excerpts: Louise Erdrich for Valentine's Day

"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.”

                                                                                           -- from The Painted Drum, 2005

Image of the cosmos from From The Quantum Universe: Everything that Can Happen Does Happen
by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

"Consider the world around you. You are holding a book made of paper, the crushed pulp of a tree...Trees are machines able to take a supply of atoms and molecules, break them down and rearrange them into cooperating colonies composed of many trillions of individual parts... This assembly of particles is able to capture the light that has travelled the 93 million miles from our star, a nuclear furnace the volume of a million earths, and transfer that energy into the heart of cells…"

                                                                                                    -- Astrophysicist Brian Cox