Quotes by Gail Caldwell

About Gail Caldwell:

Gail Caldwell was the chief book critic for The Boston Globe, where she was on staff from 1985 to 2009. Caldwell was the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The award was for eight Sunday reviews and two other columns written in 2000. According to the Pulitzer Prize board, those columns were noted for “her insightful observations on contemporary life and literature.”
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Gail Caldwell

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

Gail Caldwell

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 lon...

Gail Caldwell

Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.

Gail Caldwell

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-- ...

Gail Caldwell

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

Gail Caldwell

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

Gail Caldwell

Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathou...

Gail Caldwell

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

Gail Caldwell

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

Gail Caldwell

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

Gail Caldwell

We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy.

Gail Caldwell

Author Bio

  • NameGail Caldwell
  • DescriptionAmerican literary critic
  • Born1951
  • CountryUnited States Of America