Quotes from Robert Goolrick

There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.

If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.

There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.

I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.

I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it. And now I will have to be that person forever.

It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.

I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.

Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting.

There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us.

If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do?

I know that I am not the only person who is alone in the world. I know that others sorrow in the night. That others pick up a razor and slice into their own skin, with greater or lesser success. I know that others look at their lives and see only silent failure and disconsolation, feeding the cat, checking their email, doing the crossword. I know that I am not the only person to have lived a life like mine. I am aware. (212)

I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine.

I tell these stories because I have lied about my life to people who have been kind to me and I am tired of lying. I tell it because I don't want people to think that I have fucked up my life over and over just because I was in a bad mood.

She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living, was in fact, her life . The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object. A shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face.

Somewhere in the pain there is pleasure, and that is the most awful part, perhaps. (170)

We tend to go on loving the things the people who loved us loved. They are invested with soul, even if the people are long dead, even if they do not turn out to be who you thought they were.

Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he lived his life - every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him - everybody had a reason to be and a place to land. Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit down.

Sometime, Mrs. Truitt, we work very hard at something, we exhaust ourselves to accomplish something which seems vital to us." He chose his words with care. "Our best hope for happiness. And sometimes we find that thing, only to find it has simply not been worth the effort.

In times of grief, you're waiting for something to happen, but the thing you're waiting for has already taken place.

Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow, jerky movements of the motes that floated across her pupils. They amazed her as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved, floating listlessly through the world, occasionally bumping into another body without acknowledgment, and then floating on, free and alone.

There was so much we had done to ourselves, so much we said in our sessions that our hearts were rent with sorrow. There is so much that happens to the human heart that is in the realm of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the unbearable. (95)

We want to do something with the time we have, something that will give that time a certain meaning, a certain weight.

Nothing says hell has to be fire.