Without Quotes (page 87)
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No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.
Haruki Murakami
That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.
Nick Hornby
Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.
Jeanette Winterson
I sit beside the fire and think Of all that I have seen. Of meadow flowers and butterflies. In summers that have been. Of yellow leaves and gossamer. In autumns that there were. With morning mist and silver sun. And wind upon my hair. I sit beside the fire and think. Of how the world will be. When winter comes without a spring That I shall ever see. For still there are so many things. That I have never seen. In every wood in every spring. There is a different green. I sit beside the fire and...
J. R. R. Tolkien
Most true is it that 'beauty is in the eye of the gazer.' My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, — all energy, decision, will, — were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, — that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had...
Charlotte Bronte
Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyoneexhausting themselves, miserably hemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: nolonger tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. (Hmm. Though must admit, pretty bloody pleased to have new handbag.) What is the point of entire nation rushing round for sixweeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation thenfails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted...
Helen Fielding
We fall back into silence. I look around XO Cafe and notice that chatter happens mostly at tables where the diners are young and hip. The older couples, the ones sporting wedding bands that wink with their silverware, eat without the pepper of conversation. Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?
Jodi Picoult
He looks at Mama out of the corner of his eye, again surprised by how little she is. As if all of her life has been a slow process of shrinkage.
But just what is that shrinkage?
Is it the real shrinkage of a person abandoning his adult dimensions and starting on the long journey through old age and death toward distances where there is only a nothingness without dimension?
Milan Kundera
They were women then My mama's generation Husky of voice stout of Step With fists as well as Hands How they battered down Doors And ironed Starched white Shirts How they led Armies Headragged generals Across mined Fields Booby-trapped Ditches To discover books Desks A place for us How they knew what we MUST know Without knowing a page Of it Themselves.
Alice Walker