Gail Caldwell Quotes

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages.

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world off-kilter? It’s like leaving the train at the wrong stop: You are still you, but in a new place, there by accident or grace, and you will need your wits about you to proceed.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain.

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.

You can’t change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn’t make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don’t get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

Grief is what tells you who you are alone.

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

the mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her.

Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything.

It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

the territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace.

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of intention and his sovereignly affecting prose.... With his elliptical evocation of Mrs. Dalloway, he has managed to pay great but quiet tribute -- reminding us of the gorgeous, ferocious beauty of what endures.

My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.

I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice.

Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear.

The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.

If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.