"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 hurt, or death
brushes near, you let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the
apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell
yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
"
— Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum: A Novel)