The richness of the whole world reduced to a choice that was not a choice at all, but a sentence.
Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together.
I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.
The dead do not harm us, only the alive.
I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime's independence- yes, selfish independence- I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals. I don't...
Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.
I am not afraid of death, which after all can't be far away. What does frighten me, though, is the halfway stage.
The dead were just the dead, neither awful nor remarkable. History separated out these individuals and preserved their names where others were obilterated for ever.
The dead and not-yet dead, we are company all together.
They had lived and known glory, and then they were ddead. She was alive and they were not, and nothing but a heartbeat separated her from them
Learning is important. It is a way to make a life better for yourself and your family.
I need them and they need me to need them
Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don't matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to piece, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity. Then ...
The future offers everything. Reach out and take whatever you want.
I can only strive for what is important
I am afraid of losing what I have already valued.
Let her be with her memories. Better that than be aware of this reality.
Try to capture what you can't bear to be without
Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise what do I have left?
As well as remembering too little, I have seen too much
