Can you miss a person you’ve never known?” There.
See, unlike the rest of the free world, I didn’t get here by accident. And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it’s gone, so are you.
I once read that every story is a love story. Love of a person, a country, a way of life. Which means, of course, that all tragedies are about losing what you love.
I think people assume death is all or nothing. Someone is here, or they’re not. But that’s not what it’s like, is it? The echo of you is still here – in your children or grandchildren; in the art you made while living; in the memories other people have of you.
Sometimes you hurt the people you love. And sometimes you love the people who hurt you.
I love her. I love her to death.” “You love her through death,” I correct gently. “You don’t stop loving someone just because they’re not physically with you.
Love isn’t a perfect match, but an imperfect one. You are rocks in a tumbler. At first you bump, you scrape, you snag. But each time that happens, you smooth each other’s edges, until you wear each other down. And if you are lucky, at the end of all that, you fit.
After fifteen years, love isn’t just a feeling,” he says. “It’s a choice.
Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It’s more important to be there than to be right.
Ancient Egyptians believed that the first and most necessary ingredient in the universe was chaos. It could sweep you away, but it was also the place from which all things start anew.
We all have stories we tell ourselves, until we believe them to be true.
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. – JAMES BALDWIN.
I’m at the age where that’s a surprise, where I still think I’m going to see a younger woman rather than the one who blinks back at me.
There is something bleak and barren about a world that is missing the person who knows you best.
When you’re an artist, it’s because there’s something inside you that you can’t keep from spilling out. Maybe it comes in the form of sentences, or a grand jete, or stroke of a paintbrush. The end result can be a million different things. But the seed, it’s always the same. It’s the emotion there isn’t a word for. The feeling that’s too big for your body. To show someone your soul, you have to bleed. People who are comfortable, people who are content, they don’t create art.
When you have a child, you will do anything for her. You may not do it well, but you will kill yourself trying. You will trip over obstacles as you clear them out of her path. You will give her the choices you didn’t have.
The thing about death is that we’re all terrified of it happening, and we’re devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend that neither of these things is true.
What you know isn’t nearly as important as who you know. Who will miss you. Who you will miss.
There’s really no such thing as a right or wrong choice. We don’t make decisions. Our decisions make us.
Maybe this is all love is – twin roots of pain and pleasure. Maybe the miracle isn’t where we wind up, but that we get there at all.