Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me.
Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word “love” to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.
Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.
She’d come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn’t held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.
I hope you will be surprised and knowing at once. I hope you’ll always have love. I hope you’ll have days of ease and a good sense of humor.
Burn me,” she said finally. “Turn me to ash.” And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I’d expected. They weren’t like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I could see clearly that they’d once been bones.
The question about who you will love and when you will love him is out of your hands. It’s a mystery that you can’t solve.
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty.
I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things.
There wasn’t a day on the trail when that monotony didn’t ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure. I counted my steps, working my way to a hundred and starting over again at one. Each time I completed another set it seemed as if I’d achieved a small thing. Then a hundred became too optimistic and I went to fifty, then twenty-five, then ten.
You must love in order to be loved. You must be inclusive in order to feel yourself among the included. You must give in order to receive.
It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn’t even know I wanted until I didn’t get it.
I’m not afraid, I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn’t feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn’t entirely true anymore. Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.
She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn’t there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I’d put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.
He seemed like someone I’d always known even if I never saw him again.
We’d have long conversations during which I’d weep and tell him everything and he would cry with me and try to make it all just a tiny bit more okay, but his words rang hollow. It was almost as if I couldn’t hear them at all. What did he know about losing anything?
All of that was impossible now, regardless of what the letter said. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.
But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained.
Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it to yourself.
It would turn out to be the last full day of her life, and for most of it she held her eyes still and open, neither sleeping nor waking, intermittently lucid and hallucinatory.