You are here to risk your heart

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will break you with it's yearnings. 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 beneath 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~