Oh, Arthur, no one even sees you when you get old except for people who knew you when you were young.
People who don’t feel cared for are not always comfortable being cared for.
As for mending, I think its good to take the time to fix something rather than throw it away. Its an antidote to wastefulness and to the need for immediate gratification. You get to see a whole process through, beginning to end, nothing abstract about it. You’ll always notice the fabric scar, of course, but there’s an art to mending. If you’re careful, the repair can actually add to the beauty of the think because it is a testimony to its worth.
Sometimes I wonder what the world would sound like if everybody stopped their complaining. It sure would be a quiet place.
He tells her that, when Nola first died, he thought he’d die himself, of the sorrow. He says he’d read that grief has a catabolic effect and he thought for sure it would take him right out, this immense and gnawing pain, that it would eat him alive from the inside out. But it didn’t. It took a long time for him to shift things around so that he could still love and honor Nola but also love and honor life, but it happened. And it will happen to her.
I’ll love you forever in darkness and sun, I’ll love you past when my whole sweet life is done.
I wasn’t sure it was right to abandon myself to lighthearted banter, to allow someone to interfere with my being able to behave in whatever way I chose, whenever I wanted. What if I wanted to enjoy a memory or a good cry? I wasn’t weaned from that yet; I wasn’t finished being with him in the only way I had left.
Oh. maybe little kids are trouble, sometimes, but only for a good reason: They are tired. They are hungry. They are afraid. He supposes a great many ills of adults might be cured by a nap or a good meal or a bit of timely reassurance. But adults complicate everything. They are by nature complicators. They learned to make things harder than they need to be and they learned to talk way too much.
The one to tell. The one to be told by. For him, that was marriage.
No, love is never foolish. Or unnecessary.
Frank, saying, Who cares what happens before we’re born and after we die? The question is, what do we do in the meantime?
And she finally told Nola that she was so worried about whether she could love two children, about whether she could make room in her heart for as much love as she felt for Bobby. Wasn’t it betraying Bobby, to love another child? And Nola told her what her sister Patricia had said, after having her second. Patricia said she felt like she’d grown a second heart.
I miss you,” he says. “I still miss you, sweetheart. Every day is like the first day I lost you.
I don’t think it’s foolish. I don’t think love is ever foolish.
Life comes with problems, you have to accept that. And you have to try to lead the simple life; to not constantly ask questions about the whys and the wherefores of everything.
There are certain things in your life that will become every important to you. You might not be able to explain to anyone else why they’re important. But you will expect the people who love you, the people who are your family, to respect those things.
See, that’s what I do. I am the audience. I am the witness. I am the great appreciator, that’s what I do and that’s all I want to do. I worked for a lot of years. I did a lot of things for a lot of years. Now, well, here I am in the rocking chair, and I don’t mind it, Lucille. I don’t feel useless. I feel lucky.
I tell you, I will never understand the mystery of love. A woman comes to a man because she wants only him; then she cannot bear the sound of air moving in and out of his nostrils. She cannot bear the sight of his shadow upon the pavement!
Are these real diamonds?” I once asked, and she said, “Why have them if they’re not?
Funny how an animal can hurt your feelings when you’re all alone.