I thought of the priest who’d told me that many religions hold that it is easier to be closely connected to people we love after death than before.
Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.
You must never check for a person’s pulse using your thumb, or you’ll feel your own heartbeat. Actually, I plan on doing that if I’m the one who’s here when Ruth dies. I plan on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go.
I like to listen to sad music when I’m sad. It seems honest. It makes me cry, and sometimes a good cry is the only thing that can make you feel better.
You don’t get everything all at once. You wait.
It will happen when you’re not looking for it. Love likes to take you by surprise.
But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I’ve always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.
It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.
I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.
Remember me in your dreams, as I will you.
Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don’t agree.
Make time for prayer and reflection; try to understand your value as a man on earth but see, too, your proper place in the scheme of things. It may sound funny to say this, but I have come to see that we are all far more important and less important than we think.
Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you.
When it’s new and important, you have to rest in between times. And anyway, even when I like a person there is a weariness that comes. I can be with someone and everything is fine and then all of a sudden it can wash over me like a sickness, that I need the quiet of my own self. I need to unload my head and look at what I’ve got in there so far. See it. Think what it means. I always need to come back to being alone for a while.
Well, anyway, her death changed our lives for the better, because it brought a kind of awareness, a specific sense of purpose and appreciation we hadn’t had before. Would I trade that in order to have her back? In a fraction of a millisecond. But I won’t ever have her back. So I have taken this, as her great gift to us. But. Do I block her out? Never. Do I think of her? Always. In some part of my brain, I think of her every single moment of every single day.
What is it that makes a family? Certainly no document does, no legal pronouncement or accident of birth. No, real families come from choices we make about who we want to be bound to, and the ties to such families live in our hearts.
The light is amber, the air still; the daylilies have folded in on themselves. Soon, the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them.
Arthur thinks that, above all, aging means the abandonment of criticism and the taking on of compassionate acceptance.
Actors, painters, dancers, comedians, even just ordinary people doing ordinary things, what are they without an audience of some sort? 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, here I am in the rocking chair, and I don’t mind it, Lucille. I don’t feel useless. I feel lucky.
Everybody makes mistakes, sometimes even before we get up in the morning. We can’t help but make mistakes. The important thing is to keep trying. And to apologize when you need to.