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.
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.