Quotes from Gail Caldwell

Everything about death is a cliché until you're in it.

God is love and love is memory, and memory is a bruise or a warmth or a grocery list you cannot bear to throw away.

YESTERDAY I FOUND a note I had written to myself, in the piles of outlines and narrative maps that are a writer's building blocks. "Let Her Die," I had written at the top of a legal pad, a shorthand reminder to get to that part of the story. Then I saw it the next day and half gasped; for a moment it was as though someone else had given me this instruction. Let her die: a three-word definition of the arc of grief if ever I heard one, and it takes a long time.

But the point is not to spin the narrative; that defeats the purpose, in some way, of story itself. You can't change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn't make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don't get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

It's your love," my old friend Pete had said to me years before, when I was trying to leave a lousy relationship. "You get to keep that.

IT'S AN OLD, OLD STORY: I HAD A FRIEND AND WE shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

Long before I'd read a word of Virginia Woolf, I knew that, for me, a room of one's own was the ultimate prize. That a lock on the door was the power to think for oneself.

Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived

In the dream I knew she was dead, and I reached out for her and said, "But you're coming back, right?" She smiled but shook her head; her face was a well of sadness.

An introvert with a Texan's affability, I was well intentioned but weak on follow-through; not without reason did an old friend refer to me as the gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone.

I was in my early forties, at an age when the view from the hill can be clear and poignant both. The imagined vistas have become realized paths, and I think you may live in the present during those years more than any time since childhood.

Caldwell is the most expensive date in town," he quoted the other boys as saying. "She'll drink you under the table and she'll never put out.

By then I was thirty years old, and I'd learned that courage in a bottle could get you through all kinds of doors, and all kinds of trouble, and a lot of dead-end nights alone.

No one whose first allegiance is to the source of the problem can hear such warnings, at least not until they've dragged themselves through a few miles of broken glass.

Being in Manhattan was like running headlong toward your own life, or finding out you could fly. To turn away from it would have seemed the failure of a chance not taken.

Don't you know?" he asked gently. "The flaw is the thing we love.

the light through the windows is always more enchanting when viewed from the street outside.

I had adored my father and, in the classic Oedipal dance, had tried to find a romantic partner who measured up to him.

So I already knew, given her history with men, that his generosity and caretaking both sustained and confused her.

Fun was far more difficult to get a handle on than zeal.

Oh God," I groaned, with mock distress. "Now I guess I'll have to get a boyfriend.

I missed Caroline in dozens of ways, but through them all was the absence of the ongoing dialogue, real or imagined.

Walking, reading, watching the light change.

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.