“When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.”
“Loss isn’t an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn’t look like anything, that’s what is so strange. It just fits in.”
“My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That’s what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.”
“It’s as if my footprints were already on the road before I even got there.I walk into them, my waiting footprints.”
“She walked on and on as though if she walked far enough she might walk this thing out of her. As if by walking long enough, hard enough, she might forget.”
“I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. Nor did I feel ambitious any more. It all seemed stupid wanting to be better than the others in the same ring, shallow, pointless.”
“When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you’ve been taken into the past.”
“How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?”
“They never tell you about that either. How the hardest thing a mother has to do is give her child up, let them go, watch them run.”
“The beautiful have so much easier a time of it than the ugly, don’t you think? They get smiled at the whole time. Strangers offer them things. People notice the beautiful; the beautiful are constantly acknowledged.”
“You noticed things. You’re not sure when you start. It’s only when you’ve noticed – noticed that you know you’ve noticed. Maybe between the first time when you’re staring to think, Is this what I think it is? and the second time when you think, Yes, between those two times, there’s a silence. A pause.”
“The sound of his sleep, the snores and sighs and small noices, is company.”
“During this period I feel as if some part of myself has been banished to another part of the world.I feel as if I cannot live my life to the full and feel everything I’m capable of feeling unless I have this love. The pleasure goes from me; the delight goes. Nothing means anything.”
“You cannot penalize a man for one slip. Then she lay wondering about the word slip. When you slip, you fall, but maybe it is not such a sore fall because you have slipped.”
“Make sure that the very different colors go next to each other so it looks deliberate. You don’t want to look as if you’ve just run out of colour and gone for the next nearest thing.”
“Life is too short to argue about time.”
“I’ve never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it’s like an animal. She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. She’s whimpering. She’s sluggish. She’s not herself”
“Do things in your own time. Everybody should like how they choose. We never know what goes behind the blinds.”
“In my head maybe it was a test of love, because there are things about illness which I find revolting.”
“I’ve started to feel very odd within my own life. It’s most peculiar to feel lonely inside your own life.”
“We’re not alive to be alone on the planet. We’re alive to share, to eat together and love together and laugh together and cry together. If you can never love because you will always lose, what reason is there to live?”
“What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.”
Guy Bloke 