Rosamund Lupton

When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...

Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are.

She'd been cross so much of the time and often about small things. Looking back at herself, she thought that her crossness was like a shapeless overcoat, covering loneliness, and it wasn't the old loneliness she'd felt after her mother died, or even an adult version of it, but something different and more punishing.

...grief is loved turned into an eternal missing. ...It can't be contained in hours or days or minutes.

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

Grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels....

When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.

But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...

A selfish person can still love someone else, can't they? Even when they've hurt them and let them down.

It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people's too - yours, Leo's, Dad's. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.

The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now.

My job isn't to go around judging people. Priests are meant to teach love and forgiveness. That to me is the essence of being a Christian. And trying to find that love and forgiveness in ourselves and others every day should be a challenge that we want to achieve.

I wanted to make him understand that we shared the details of our lives, because they were the threads that braided us so closely together. And you would have been certain to tell me about a Sabatier knife, because it would have had the rare value of being a detail in your life which tied directly into mine - Bee in Sister

Our mind is who we are; it__ where we feel and think and believe. It__ where we have love and hate and faith and passion._ I was getting a little embarrassed by your earnestness but you continued, __ow can someone hope to treat another person__ mind unless they are also a theologian and a philosopher and a poet?

Just thinking of your laughter gives me courage. . .

Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that,or was I just too concerned that you weren't going to earn a living? I know the answer...I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone's carpet, rather than realizing that you'd made color itself tactile.

Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.

I don't believe outstandingly beautiful and charismatic women create obsession in what would otherwise be normal men, but rather they attract the weirdos and the stalkers; flames in the darkness that these disturbing people inhabit, unwittingly drawing them closer until they extinguish the very flame they were drawn to.