43 quotes found
“Though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occursnothing that would sound even r...”
“And theres also To him that hath shall be given. After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence cant give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.”
“I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.”
“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is differen...”
“You cant see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You cant, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you cant get the best out of it. Now! Lets...”
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as yo...”
“Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will ...”
“Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. ...”
“There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition. Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going on for some time.”
“Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakeslike the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all nightlittle flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The rea...”
“Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.”
“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.”
“On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome stick...”
“Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after hes had his leg off is quite another. After that ...”
“Sometimes it is hard not to say "God forgive God." Sometimes, it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.”
“Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?”
“I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If onl...”
“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It does...”
“And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job--where the machine seems to run on much as usual--I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is t...”
“But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me 'she goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, ...”
