How is it that we dare to honk at others in traffic, when we know nothing about where they have just come from or what they are on their way to?
What mattered was that at the end, someone who loved her sat by her, saying, I see you. I.
She believes that her last chance for love just died, and her last chance was her first love, and there is something about that that is awfully hard to bear. Think about it. To know you’re at the end of hoping for love and to realize that something else will have to do, if you’re going to have any reason to go on.
Isn’t it really true that life is so beautiful because it’s so fleeting and fragile?
That summer rain I mean that is so quiet and matter of fact and falls straight down like a curtain. Now.
But losing weight for health reasons is a very dull prospect, doomed at the outset. Losing weight for romance, that’s altogether different.
Nobody knows what goes on in other families, because families lie about themselves to other people. Not only to other people but to one another. And to themselves.
She doesn’t exactly know why kids don’t like her. She’s good-looking enough. She has a sense of humor. She’s not dumb. She guesses it’s because they can sense how much she needs them. They are like kids in a circle holding sticks, picking on the weak thing. It is in people, to be entertained by cruelty.
We’re all trapped in a body with limitations, even the most able-bodied among us! And we’re all guided by minds with limitations of their own. You want to know my philosophy? It’s this: Our job, regardless of our bodily circumstances is to rise above what holds us down, and to help others do the same.
Life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.
I used to make a basket of my hands to hold a feeling of joy that came upon me, then flatten my hands against my chest as if to make it part of me. Not understanding that it already was.
Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can’t control them coming in. But you don’t have to let them all out.
I am in agreement with Goethe, who said that every day one ought to ‘hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.’ I would add to this the need to love. Without it, the rest is dust.
I think the kind of love that comes after romantic love is the best, richest love of all. At some point, I think we all want someone we can look ugly around, reveal our vulnerabilities to, and, most important, trust. And as a former nurse, I found that when people are at their most vulnerable, at their “ugliest,” is when they’re the most beautiful. In this novel, I think true love is saying, “I see you wholly and I love you anyway.
I do not believe the loss of a child is something one ever overcomes. One puts on the faces one needs, but inside, one bleeds and bleeds.
Never think winter will last when spring is equally inevitable.
What does anyone say to anybody who used to be so important in her life, whom she’s not seen in such a long time? It seems to me that in situations like this, we’re all wondering the same thing: I’m still me; are you still you? A.
What Maddy has come to believe is that certain life circumstances make for people who walk with a psychic limp for all of their days. Never mind the progress they seem to make, peel back a few delicate layers and there it is: a stubborn doubting of worth; an inability to stand with conviction behind anything without wondering if they should be standing there at all; a sense that if they move in this direction, it’s wrong; and if they move in that direction, that’s wrong, too.
He tells her that, when Nola first died, he thought he’d die himself, of the sorrow.
I should have said “powder room.” That would evoke the image of me sitting before a beautiful gold mirror, a vase of fresh flowers nearby, freshening my makeup, rather than sitting on a toilet.