Quotes from Gail Caldwell

The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.

The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.

I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice.

The flaw is the thing we love.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Grief is what tells you who you are alone.

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.

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 longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

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-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything.

The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.

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

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they're sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you're poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected.

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.

Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn't stand to lose.