Robert Goolrick

If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.

There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.

I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.

It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.

I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.

Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting.