Collection 2
Hearts That Love
Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
—Willa Cather
Love—we think about it, sing about it, dream about it, lose sleep worrying about it. When we don’t have it, we search for it; when we discover it, we don’t know what to do with it; when we have it, we fear losing it. It’s a constant source of pleasure and pain, but we can’t predict from one minute to the next which it’s going to be today. It takes on many shapes and many disguises: We love our parents, our brothers and sisters, our boyfriends and girlfriends, our cats and dogs, our comfortable shoes, and our baseball gloves. Love—it’s a short word, easy to spell, difficult to define, impossible to live without.
WRITING FOCUS: Analyzing a Character
Writer’s Notebook
In the stories, novels, and plays that you’ve read over the past few years, which characters do you remember best? Were they involved in a search for love, or did they struggle to find something else? List the names of the fictional characters who stick in your memory—because you either liked them or thought them horrible. Save your notes. You may want to write about one of these characters in the Writer’s Workshop for this collection.