Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
C. S. Lewis
English essayist & juvenile novelist (1898 - 1963)

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
Colette
French novelist (1873 - 1954)

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
(1742 - 1799)