She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love – nothing, now, but bones.
Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.
It’s funny how things seem different, suddenly.
She saw herself moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life.
A film closed over the past as she spoke, a barrier as brittle and fragile as ice forming. It would grow and strengthen. It would become impenetrable, opaque.
Crocuses shouted purple and white against the bright grass;.
He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable.
Sometimes loneliness is an emergency situation.
For the rest of his life, he realized, he would be torn like this, aware of Phoebe’s awkwardness, the difficulties she encountered in the world simply by being different, and ye propelled beyond all this by her direct and guileless love. By her love, yes, and, he realized... by his own new and strangely uncomplicated love for her.
How was it possible to let a child grow up and go out into that dangerous and unpredictable world?
I don’t see how sucking the joy out of every aspect of life can be pleasing to anybody’s God.
Water moves forever in a circle; someday, little ones, your grandchildren may even drink your tears.
They can learn- they must learn- to appreciate the history of their good fortune through the experiences of those who not only witnessed history, but made it.
Grown now, he stood in a train station or on the sidewalk beneath fluttering leaves or strode across a street. He paused in front of shop windows, or reached into his pocket for a ticket, or shaded his eyes against the sun. He’d grown from her body and now, astonishingly, he moved through the world without her. She.
The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.
You couldn’t blame him, no, you couldn’t fault him for wanting to go deeper into every fleeting moment, to study its mystery.
For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.
I suppose I want him to be happy,” she said at last. “Whatever in life makes him happy, I want him to have that. I don’t care what it is, as long as he grows up to be good and true to himself.
But now she dreamed every night of lost things.
A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different.
Do what you love, and the money will follow.