About love and how to survive - not to make a living - but how to survive whole in a world where we are all of us, in some measure, victims of something. Each one of us in some way at some moment a victim and in no position to do anything about it. Some child is always left unpicked up at some moment. In a world like that, how does one remain whole - is it just impossible to do that?

-Toni Morrison, in Conversations