When I look at my eighty-five-year-old face in the mirror today, I think, “You’re never going to look better than you do today, honey, so smile.” Whoever said a smile is the best face-lift was one smart woman.
I’m still embarrassed and mad at myself. But after seventy years, I also feel sorry for the girl I used to be. She was awfully hard on herself.
You know, Ava, it’s good to be smart, but kindness is more important.
She told us that social work was a young profession still finding itself. She called it a “creative science” and said that, in her opinion, the best social workers were intelligent and compassionate, and while she could give us ideas and tools to help our fellow man, she couldn’t teach us how to put ourselves into another person’s shoes. She said, “If you don’t already know how to do that, you should drop this class and consider another line of work.
She said, “Hiking is the same thing as walking, only hotter and twice as far as you want to go. But usually, you’re glad you went.
As far as I can tell, common sense hasn’t been in fashion for a long time.
If you treat every question like you’ve never heard it before, your students feel like you respect them and everyone learns a lot more. Including the teacher.
Why is it you get more tired from sitting and doing nothing than from running around doing too much?
I always felt I understood myself better after we spent time together. And the way she laughed at my wisecracks and thanked me for my opinions made me think maybe I was as smart and funny as she said i was.
No girl is ever happy with her own hair, is she?
She approved. “A girl should always have her own money so she’s never beholden to anyone.” I said that was very modern of her, but she didn’t think so. “As far as I can tell, common sense hasn’t been in fashion for a long time.
Remember this moment, when your mother’s body heals every trouble of your soul.
I wish I had more to tell of my grandmothers. It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why, I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing.
I am so honored to be the vessel into which you pour this story of pain and strength. For all these years, no daughter could have made me happier or more proud than you. Now that I know who you are and what life has cost you, I am in awe that I number you among my beloved.
If you sit on the bank of a river, you see only a small part of its surface. And yet, the water before your eyes is proof of unknowable depths.
In the moment before I crossed over, I knew that the priests and magicians of Egypt were fools and charlatans for promising to prolong the beauties of life beyond the world we are give. Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. All of life’s pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.
According to the Talmud, if a funeral procession and a wedding procession cross paths, the wedding party goes first. Life is more important than death.
Sometimes friends grow apart. You tell each other everything and you’re sure this is a person you’ll know the rest of your life but then she stops writing or calling, or you realize she’s really not so nice, or she turns into a right-winger. Remember your friend Suzie? But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk – it’s still there. That was Filomena and me.
They all agreed that things were better in the old days. Some of them were sad about it and some were bitter, but it was always, ‘Nothing is as good as it used to be.’ I swore I would never talk like that and you know what? Now that I’m an old lady myself, I think that most things are better than they used to be. Look at the computers. Look at your sister, the cardiologist, and you, graduating from Harvard. Don’t talk to me about the good old days. What was so good?
We are all born of the same mother.