"Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." 

On Loved Ones:

 "Before she died (1973), my cousin Monica sent me a book. It was a copy of King Lear. (unexpectedly found), which had belonged to my own mother (d. 1937).... In the list of characters in the play, there were two left-handed check marks ( ), one before Edmund, one before Goneril. Edmund says, "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune -- often of the surfeit of our own behavior -- we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion...." An eerie feeling this -- that one's own mother, who died when you were nine, must have been left-handed, that she too read Shakespeare, once upon a time, that by checking Edmund, that she reminded her son many years later of our foibles and pretenses, of his own, even. The left-handed check is, I think, the only thing I possess indicating my mother's mind. Photos, of which I have a few, do not do this. No letters, no words survive. Those who loved us disappear silently. "