[Ongoing] Words that resonated in 2023

I enjoyed doing this so much in 2022, that I decided to do it again.

Good Bones by Maggie Jones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

[I love that line — “a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways.” We don’t use the word ‘delicious’ enough!]

“He is a logger, past his professional expiration date but lacking both the financial and psychological savings to retire.”
— Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

[No context — but it’s just a lovely sentence.]

“Invisible and eternal things are made known through visible and temporal things.”
— Hildegard von Bingen, Benedictine abbess, 1151

“Sweet Madeline, full of fire and laughter. So different from Elif and I, with a spirit so big in a body so dainty and small. She’d loved us all with a ferocity. She was unabashed in her wants and needs, joy and fury.”
— Noelle Salazar, Angels of the Resistance

“We are made up of our details. The way we hold coffee mugs, unhook bras, or pronounce jewelry. Alzheimer’s began stripping away my father’s details and replacing them with new compulsive ones …”
– Rebecca Handler, “My Father’s Changing Hands”

“Art is how we decorate space;
Music is how we decorate time.”
– Jean Michel Basquiat

Clementine von Radics, “Mouthful of Forevers”

I am not the first person you loved.
You are not the first person I looked at
with a mouthful of forevers. We
have both known loss like the sharp edges
of a knife. We have both lived with lips
more scar tissue than skin. Our love came
unannounced in the middle of the night.
Our love came when we’d given up
on asking love to come. I think
that has to be part
of its miracle.
This is how we heal.
I will kiss you like forgiveness. You
will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms
will bandage and we will press promises
between us like flowers in a book.
I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat
on your skin. I will write novels to the scar
of your nose. I will write a dictionary
of all the words I have used trying
to describe the way it feels to have finally,
finally found you.

And I will not be afraid
of your scars.

I know sometimes
it’s still hard to let me see you
in all your cracked perfection,
but please know:
whether it’s the days you burn
more brilliant than the sun
or the nights you collapse into my lap
your body broken into a thousand questions,
you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I will love you when you are a still day.
I will love you when you are a hurricane.

“Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighborhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home. There’s a small pleasure in seeing how well I’ve come to know the city through my wanderings on foot, crossing through different neighborhoods of the city, some I used to know quite well, others I may not have seen in a while, like getting reacquainted with someone I once met at a party.”

– Maria Popova, “Why We Walk: A Manifesto for Peripatetic Empowerment”

“Late one night many years ago, my infant son started to cry and couldn’t be consoled. An hour passed, and nothing else worked to calm him, we got in the car and started driving. We drove east through cornfields and towards a circular cloud with a thunderstorm inside. A storm contained in a floating orb, a cumulonimbus with lightning shooting through its veins like an aorta or an electric eel. My son had long since stopped crying, but we kept moving towards the cloud.

Sometimes, writing has the same pull. It’s often a drag, always a practice, but those of us who write or do any kind of creative work are often moving towards a hovering story that’s always a little more east, a few miles further ahead.

Somewhere along the way, many of us think about writing a book.

Why do so many of us want to be published in the first place: what’s at the heart of that impulse? What’s the root of the tug? In a 2017 TED Talk Anne Lamott sums up why writers write: “you’re going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart. Your stories, memories, visions, and songs … in your own voice. That’s really all you have to offer us, and that’s also why you were born.”

Lamott doesn’t say we’re born to publish books. In fact, she warns against publishing to fill a void. “Publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt, damage, and change you in ways you cannot imagine,” she says. “It’s also a miracle to get your work published … just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you. That it will fill the swiss-cheesy holes inside of you. It can’t, it won’t. But writing can.”

– Sara Billups, “The Irresistible Peril of Publishing”

(An assortment of quotes from Anne Lamott’s TED talk, “12 truths I learned from life and writing”. I bolded some of my favorite quotes.)

“Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it’s impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It’s been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It’s so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we’re being punked. It’s filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I don’t think it’s an ideal system.”

“Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. That’s the secret of life. That’s probably the main difference between you and them. They just do it. They do it by prearrangement with themselves. They do it as a debt of honor. They tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little. When my older brother was in fourth grade, he had a term paper on birds due the next day, and he hadn’t started. So my dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper, pencils and brads — for those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember brads — and he said to my brother, “Just take it bird by bird, buddy. Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your own voice. And then find out about chickadees, and tell us about them in your own voice. And then geese.

So the two most important things about writing are: bird by bird and really god-awful first drafts. If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.

You’re going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions and songs — your truth, your version of things — in your own voice. That’s really all you have to offer us, and that’s also why you were born.”

“The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. To summon grace, say, “Help,” and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn’t leave you where it found you. And grace won’t look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably. But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you’ll get your sense of humor about yourself back. Laughter really is carbonated holiness. It helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember — grace always bats last.”

“Eleven: God just means goodness. It’s really not all that scary. It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great “Deteriorata,” “the cosmic muffin.” A good name for God is: “Not me.” Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot and look up. My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lids because they don’t look up, so they just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls. Go outside. Look up. Secret of life.”

“I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness — and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine.”

“C.S. Lewis, who knew and loved the medieval “cosmos”, describes it as “tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine” (cited in Ward, Planet Narnia, p. 24). It was an organic whole, ordered from within, animated by a hierarchy of souls, perhaps even by a “world soul.” This is not pantheism, although it could become so once the transcendence of God had been forgotten. It meant that nature possessed a sacred and spiritual value, by virtue of its creation by God and the immanent presence of God within it. The world was a book, pregnant with meanings that God had placed there. All things, even the conjectured world soul, were creatures. The stars and planets in particular were angelic creatures, participating in their own way in the cosmic intelligence, the movements of their high dance helping to determine the pattern of events unfolding below.

…

As Taylor puts it in A Secular Age, the typically modern person lives as an isolated or “buffered self” in a “disenchanted world.” He feels himself to be disengaged from the world around him, rather than intrinsically related to it (by family, tribe, birthplace, religion, or vocation). He is expected to forge his own destiny by an exercise of choice. He is concerned less with what is right than with what his rights are, or rather he grounds the former on the latter. The world for him is just a neutral space for his action, his free choice, and the greatest mysteries lie not outside but within himself.[5]

They are the unimpeded movement of the most perfect impulse towards the most perfect Object.”

– Stratford Caldecott, “The Christian Cosmology of C.S. Lewis”

Various Effects of Love by Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio
To be fainthearted, to be bold, possessed,
abrasive, tender, open, isolated,
spirited, dying, dead, invigorated,
loyal, treacherous, venturesome, repressed.

Not to find, without your lover, rest.
To seem happy, sad, haughty, understated,
emboldened, fugitive, exasperated,
satisfied, offended, doubt-obsessed.

To face away from disillusionment,
to swallow venom like liqueur, and quell
all thoughts of gain, embracing discontent;

to believe a heaven lies within a hell,
to give your soul to disillusionment;
that’s love, as all who’ve tasted know too well.

“My love for books arrived pre-memory. There is no before. Books were always my stalwart companions, my escape hatches, my private joys.”
– Emma Straub

[I adored Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. My judge of a good book is that it makes me want to write. It was beautifully written and so many lines just knocked me off my rocker — they were just that good.]

“William rarely laughed and his hands tingled, as if they’d just woken up from an oxygen-deprived sleep. The overall sensation was one of being pleasantly tickled. … In the middle of the quad, attention from a specific girl reeled in laughter from the nooks and crannies within him. William’s body — tired and bored by his hesitant mind — had to set off fireworks in his nerves and muscles to alert him that something of import was taking place.”

“We’re not separated from the world by our own edges. … We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mothers garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don’t have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they’re contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.”

“She looked for third doors because she was like her father. Julia sought to collect labels like honors student, girlfriend, and wife, but Sylvie steered away from labels. She wanted to be true to herself with every word she uttered, every action she took, and every belief she held. … Sylvie would keep boycotting boring classes to read in parks. She wouldn’t settle for less than true love. … She would wait, forever if necessary, for a man who saw the expanse of her, the way her father had. … He was gone and no one else really knew her. Julia, Emeline, and Cecelia each saw a slightly different Sylvie: she was soft with Emeline, in response to her sister’s softness, and playful with Julia because they enjoyed challenging each other. Sylvie was curious in Cecelia’s presence because her artist sister spoke and thought different from anyone else she knew.”

“Kent’s affection for William was too clear and too uncomplicated. It shone on William like the sun. No one had ever loved him unconditionally like this, and that love, when he was the most undeserving he’d ever been in his life, made William feel like he was burning up.”

“He’d never had this level of molecular awareness before, never felt so much in a single moment. William had always evaded the pointed spears that emotions threw at him and been quick to smother any comfortable sensations. He had a hard time believing that other people were able to stand being alive if it came at them with this intensity.”

“Of all the sisters, she reminded him the most of Julia. She shared her older sister’s searing focus. Cecelia was more curious than Julia, though, and more interested in getting to the bottom of things. He’d heard Cecelia tell her sisters once, “I don’t give a shit what people think of me.” William had been startled by this, partly because he believed her, and partly because it hadn’t occurred to him that this was an option.”

“‘When I was a kid, my dream was to find a great love, like the kind you read about in a Brontë novel. Or Tolstoy. … I didn’t have any interest in being a girlfriend, and I didn’t care about becoming a wife. I knew that if I never found my great love, I would rather be single than settle for a mediocre relationship. I can’t bear to pretend happiness.’ Sylvie waved her hands for a seconds, as if they were wet and she wanted them to dry. ‘Here’s the thing I realized, though. I always thought I wanted that dream because I was romantic and destined to live a big life, but that wasn’t true. I created that dream because real life scared me, and that dream seemed so far-fetched I didn’t think it would ever happen. … I didn’t think I would ever find a man, other than my father, who truly understood me. Who would see the way I look at the world, what reading means to me, how I wonder about everything. Someone who would see the best version of me, and make me believe that I could be that person.’ Sylvie blinked several times, as if trying to hold back tears. Her hands were in fists at her sides. ‘I thought that type of love was a fairy tale. I thought that kind of man didn’t exist. Which meant I got to feel good about the fact that I had a dream and yet I could stay safe with my sisters.’ Sylvie gave him a long look and William knew he was in terrible trouble. He wasn’t walking away — he was standing in fire. ‘I see all of you,’ he said, but his voice was quiet.”

[I adore Sylvie, because I see so much of her in me.]

“She wanted peace and the ability to lie in bed without feeling like she was going to explore. She wanted to speak the words manacled inside her. She wanted everything, because she could feel the walls they had both erected to hold back their desires, and she could sense the enormous beauty that lay on the far side of those walls.”

[Manacled!!! What a word!!]

“She delighted in the fact that she could show and tell William anything that came into her head without worrying that he would misunderstand or think her strange.”

“Our relationship doesn’t feel like a relationship to me, anyway,” she said one evening, while he was watching a Bulls game on his small television. She had been sitting next to him, dipping in and out of a novel. … “What does it feel like?” he said, without looking away from the screen. “Like all the walls have been knocked down. Like we’re past needing a roof or doors. They’re irrelevant.”

“William sat down, and the other men and women in the room immediately stepped forward, as if they were an external structure designed to keep Alice’s father from collapse. Towering men leaned toward him, willing him their own great strength. Alice, in the same moment, stepped backward. Everyone here loves him, she thought in amazement. They love him so much. She realized she’d expected her father to have a smaller life than hers. After all, he’d given her up. That seemed like a retreat, a refuse to live. But someone who turned away from people didn’t inspire this kind of response. She never been a room with this much love and grief, this much emotion.”

[I read this, and thought, “Dang. That’s community.”]

“Earlier that afternoon, when Emeline had noticed Alice watching Rose’s dramatic tears, she’d whispered into her nieces ear, “Grief is love.” Now Alice thought, Forgiveness is too.”

“He was feeling unsteady on his feet. He led the way, and they lowered themselves to the stone seat, with their long backs to the house. William’s whole life drummed inside him, and he knew Sylvie would say it was all related to love — it had been withheld. He’d believed he didn’t deserve it, then he had allowed it in. He realized, startled, that he loved the young woman sitting next to him. He’d loved her since the day she was born. William felt a warmth travel through him.”

“William pictured them, portraits of the people who loved them, framed by windows across the back of the house. He could feel their care and concern. He could feel their hope too. Life had surprised them all, as if the sea had risen dramatically, lifting their boat precipitously high — in the midst of a moment of sadness. If this could happen, if William and Alice could sit side-by-side and talk under the evening sky, then truly anything could happen, Julia could share her life with her sisters again; Rose could lay down her grudges and walk forward in lightness; Kent could find a new love.”

“William said, “For a long time, Sylvie knew me better than I knew myself. I think sometimes” — now it was his turn to pause — “We need another pair of eyes. We need the people around us.”

“I get asked sometimes, at events and stuff, how I can bear to write about such personal things; and almost always what I want to say is that I can’t, and I wish I hadn’t. It feels churlish to say that, though, because almost always the person asking is asking in a way that means they are grateful that I did. It is usually because they have read one of my books, or an essay or something, and it made them feel less alone. And so that’s basically what I say to them: I say that I write it so that other people can feel less lonely, and that’s why I do it.

Which is true! But it is also true that writing about yourself is a compulsion and one I don’t know how to heal.

I don’t know if “heal” is the right word: I don’t know if writing, this kind of writing, is actually a wound, or if it just feels like one. Would it get better if I stopped picking at it? I always want to know if there’s fresh pink skin under the scab, or something much worse. I always want to know how I feel, so I can feel it.

The compulsion to write, different from the compulsion to publish, is because I have an obsessional desire to know how I feel about things. Or how I might feel about things. Or how, if things were different, I could feel about things.”
– Ella Risbridger

“On my recent book tour, I had a line that killed: It was about the pleasure I get from finding my father in his books, in the paragraphs about jazz or various Milwaukee relics or the smell of a particular chocolate chip cookie, and the idea of my children someday finding little kernels of me in my books and finding a version of both of us in This Time Tomorrow. They’ll find me, and their Pops, together. Sometimes, this would make me cry. Sometimes, it would make other people cry. I said it every night and meant it every time.”

“We live in a time of death, rampant as wildflowers, though of course it’s always been true that people — the ones sitting in the uncomfortable chairs and the ones largely motionless in the adjustable hospital beds, lips parched, skin dry — need stories to take them somewhere else. When my mother, my brother, and I left the hospital yesterday, I had in my bag the stack of books my father had been reading — Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, a biography of Jean Rhys, and a galley of the new Julian Barnes novel that I’d brought him from my bookstore. My mother brought home the books she had bought him for their 56th wedding anniversary eight days prior: A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them and Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier. Now that’s romance. Find me someone who had more books in an ICU, ever, and I will give you a large prize.”

“What does it mean to have a parent (and to be a parent) whose stories exist in the world? What does it feel like to be able to download an audiobook to spend more time with an earlier version of him? I just saved all of his voice-mails, one of which said, in total, “This is the hunchback in apartment nine. You’re making too much noise upstairs.””

“In the hospital, I read my father two of my favorite poems — Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You,” which a friend read at my wedding, and Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer,” which is about the poet’s young daughter, also a writer. In it, the poet and his daughter help to free a bird that has flown into the house, and eventually it does find an open window, “clearing the sill of the world.” I knew the poem because my father had chosen it for my eighth-grade yearbook quote. Yesterday, all these years later, I chose the poem for him. In it, I hear the familiar clack of his fingers on the keyboard, the pauses, and the noisy return. I was both the girl and the writer, and my father was, too. He was in the room when I was born, and I was in the room when he died. How many of us make it to that room knowing that our love has been communicated, received, and reciprocated?”

– Emma Straub, “This Time Tomorrow, Today”

[I think I like these quotes so much because they connect two very tender things for me — words and loss. Grief tends to finagle itslef into all the nooks and crannies of our lives, so it’s no surprise that it’s meaning is amplified by what we read, too.]

“Sadness and good food are incompatible. The old sages knew that wine lets the tongue loose, but one can grow melancholy with even the best bottle, especially as one grows older. The appearance of food, however, brings instant happiness. A paella, a choucroute garnie, a pot of tripes a la mode de Caen, and so many other dishes of peasant origin guarantee merriment. The best talk is around that table. Poetry and wisdom are its company…Cats and dogs don’t stay far from the busy kitchen. Heaven is a pot of chili simmering on the stove. If I were to write about the happiest days of my life, many of them would have to do with food and wine and a table full of friends. One could compose an autobiography mentioning every memorable meal in one’s life and it would probably make better reading than what one ordinarily gets. Honestly, what would you rather have, the description of a first kiss or of stuffed cabbage done to perfection?”
– Charles Simic, The Life of Images

[If you read, “A Heart that Works,” I can’t promise that it won’t gut you. It’s grief and love, plain and simple. So, a lot of quotes from it.]

“WHEN YOU’RE A PARENT and your child gets hurt or sick, not only do you try to help them get better, but you’re also animated by the general belief that you can help them get better. It might not be the wound-cleaning you personally administer or the medicine you yourself pour into their mouth-you might have to get them to a nurse or a doctor who has the right equipment and skill set but you believe that it’s you who will get them to the right place, via car or taxi or, God forbid, ambulance, and that once there, you’ll sit by their side or maybe hold them in your lap and they’ll get what they need. Add a little time to mend, heal, rest, and you’ll soon have an exciting story to tell.

That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, the nurses and the doctors can’t fix what’s wrong.

Sometimes, children die.

Whatever’s wrong with your child gets worse and they suffer and then they die. After they die, their body begins to decompose and later, it’s zipped into a black bag and taken away by an undertaker in a black van. A few days later, your child is buried in a hole in the ground or cremated in a furnace that incinerates their body into ashes, which you take back to your house and put on a shelf. You wish you could take a kitchen knife and stick it into yourself near one of your shoulders and pull it down and across to the hip on the opposite side of your torso. Then you’d tear apart skin, fat, muscle, and viscera, and pull your child out of you again and kiss them and hold them and try frantically to fix what you couldn’t fix the first time. But that wouldn’t work. So you sit there like a decaying disused train station while freight train after freight train overloaded with pain roars through you. Maybe one will derail and explode, destroying the station and killing you, and you can go be with your child. Would that be so bad?

Why do I feel compelled to talk about it, to write about it, to disseminate information designed to make people feel something like what I feel? What my wife feels? What my other sons feel? Done properly, it will hurt them. Why do I want to hurt people? (And I do.)

Did my son’s death turn me into a monster? That’s certainly possible.

It doesn’t sanctify you. Things get broken. Maybe it’s because I write and perform for a living that I can’t help but try to share or communicate the biggest, most seismic event that has happened to me. The truth is, despite the death of my son, I still love people. And I genuinely believe, whether it’s true or not, that if people felt a fraction of what my family felt and still feels, they would know what this life and this world are really about.

Not infrequently, I find myself wanting to ask people I know and like to imagine a specific child of theirs, dead in their arms. If you have more than one child, it’s critical you pick one for this exercise. If you’re reading this, and you have a child, do it now.

Imagine them, in your arms. Tubes are coming out of various holes, some of which are natural, some of which were made with a scalpel.

There’s mess coming out of some of the tubes. There are smells. The temperature of your child’s body is dropping. No breath, none of the wriggling that seems to be the main activity of kids, no heartbeat. Even just that; imagine searching for your child’s heartbeat and you can’t find one. Their heart will never beat again. It’s not a nightmare you can wake from; defibrillation won’t work. It won’t beat because your child is dead. After a bit, someone will put them in a refrigerated drawer, like you do with celery that turns white and soft when you forget about it. Did you ever make funny horns on their head with shampoo while they were in the bathtub? You will never do that again. Did they ask for help with their shoelaces and their homework? Did you comfort them after a skinned knee? That will never happen again.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever ask anyone to do that face-to-face. Honestly, the idea makes me laugh. Where would we do it? A kitchen, probably. Do I make them tea first?

But the point is that I feel the urge.

That is one thing grief does to me.

It makes me want to make you understand. It makes me want you to understand.

I want you to understand.

But you, statistically, cannot.

You forget that my son died. Then you remember. Then you forget again.

I don’t forget. I don’t hanker for much about Victorian times, but the idea of wearing all black following the death of someone you love makes a lot of sense to me. For a while, anyway, I’d have liked you to know, even from across the street or through a telescope, that I am grieving.”

“When you learn to scuba dive, you do all the straightforward things you’d imagine, first studying written material and then learning how all the equipment works and how to communicate with your partner. But you also practice situations for when things go wrong, from running out of oxygen to losing visibility if your mask is compromised for some reason. For that particular drill, we would sit at the bottom of the deep end of the pool with no masks on and our eyes closed for a few minutes, then ascend blindly to safety. Before we submerged, the instructor explained that it would be scary, and we might want to freak out or, indeed, might actually freak out. A couple of people in the class were visibly scared. I was not.

I descended the twelve or so feet and sat on the bottom of the pool in darkness and felt lots of things, but none of them were fear. Mainly, I felt strongly that I was in a situation where if something went wrong, I could very, very quickly be with Henry. And that felt good. …

I consciously thought, “I’m quite a bit closer to death twelve feet underwater and without sight than I was a few minutes ago. My son Henry did death and died not long ago. I won’t take the regulator out of my mouth and inhale a lungful of water on purpose, but if it got knocked out by another flailing student and my own fin got caught on a drain, and I panicked and inhaled, and they couldn’t revive me-well, then that would be okay.” I felt like a lava lamp; the bits of plastic gloop bubbling around in me were actually bits of a dark sort of peace with death, a harmony with the knowledge that my son had died and that my own death would see me walk through a door he had walked through. We would share one more thing together. And that would be fucking great.”

“Maggie was married to a wonderful man named Tobias, for whom she’d fallen pretty hard several years earlier. My whole family fell for him, to be honest. He was a kind, gregarious, intelligent guy, who really fulfilled a “solar” social role in that he warmed everybody up and people were happy to rotate around him and bask. He also had a couple of degrees from Harvard, but we didn’t hold that against him.”

“In some dreams, he’s recovered, and sometimes his cranial nerves have been repaired somehow, and it all works out. He runs into his mother’s arms. He plays with his brothers, or even fights with them, and loves it all.

Other times, I’ll dream about a terribly wounded animal that I’m frantically trying to fix, but I don’t have the proper tools. I wake myself up crying and struggling to breathe. I love these dreams. They hurt like hell and terrify me and make me feel close to him.”

“ONE NIGHT, SOON AFTER, I told one of Henry’s night carers, Rachel, that his cancer had returned and that he was going to die. She yelled,

“Oh no! Oh Henry! Oh, Jesus Christ, no!” She recoiled from the news like I’d hit her. “No, no, no,” she continued.

“Yes, yes,” I thought.

Her response was like water in the desert to me. Rachel was from Nigeria and a mom and a devout Christian. Maybe one or more of those factors explained her response, I don’t know. But it beat the hell out of a lot of the English and American responses Leah and I were getting from people when they heard the news.”

“The situation with Mira is one of those ancillary pains that accompany your child’s death, like a barnacle on the whale swimming in and out of your guts day and night. Or maybe the grief is a mad king whose dirty robe sweeps up nettles and rocks and shells and stray cutlery and shit and misunderstandings, and drags them all through your house and tracks them on your bed and your walls and ceilings. You really can’t even imagine the compound horrors that build up around the dying and the death itself and threaten to choke you. So much is poisoned. And Mira was a good person! We loved her! I still do!

She just couldn’t handle a very difficult thing, so she pulled the ripcord and left. We couldn’t do that.”

“My favorite historical response to someone hearing about a “big” death comes from the character Henry Clerval in Mary Shelley’s masterwork, Frankenstein. When Henry learns that his best friend Victor Frankenstein’s young brother William has been murdered, he says,

“I can offer you no consolation, my friend. Your disaster is irreparable. What do you intend to do?”

Perfect. There is no consolation.

The disaster is irreparable. I’ve read Frankenstein twice since our Henry died. It is my companion in grief.”

Zach Bryan, Fear and Fridays

“I have taken my motorbike down the Pacific 101,
and I have stood atop the Empire State Building with my father.
I have ridden the fear although I was afraid every single time.
I have learned that every waking moment is enough
and excess never leads to better things,
it only piles and piles atop the things
that are already abundantly in front of you
like breathing and chasing and slow dancing and love making,
fighting and laughing.
I am unhinged, unworthy, and distasteful to mostly everyone I meet. However, I am loyal to a fault to anyone I find kindness in.
I do not and will not fear tomorrow because I feel as though today has been enough.
I’ve got no hate in my heart for anything, anywhere, or anyone.
And I think fear and Fridays got an awful lot in common —
They’re overdone and glorified and always leave you wanting.”

“I like a good cigar,” he said slowly. “The first drag. The way it smells, the way it feels in my mouth. If I smoke too often, I don’t appreciate it as much. So I savor them and only indulge once in a while.”

Lenka was beaming at him like he was a prized pupil. “Go on,” she urged.

He thought for a few seconds, and his list got much longer. “I hate being cold, but I like sunshine in January. When it’s so frigid it bites, yet the sun shines off the snow and warms the top of your hat and the tip of your nose.

“I like the smell of the sea on my sheets and bacon on the stove. I like a close shave and a hot towel around my face. A good pair of socks” — he glanced at Dani — “and peppermint drops. I have a sweet tooth. I don’t think about food all that much. I’m not picky. But if you buy me a bag of candy, I’ll eat it all.”

“Noted,” Lenka said.

“I don’t care for John Philip Sousa or marching bands, but I get excited when I hear a storm. God’s cymbals, my father used to say,” Malone added.

“Excellent!” Lenka clapped. “Anything else?”

“I like an empty church and big dogs. I don’t like small ones. They look too much like rats, and I don’t like rats. And I prefer brown eyes to blue, though if you can have one of each, that’s even better.”

– Amy Harmon, The Unknown Beloved

The Wishing Game, Meg Shaffer

“It’s a terrible thing your parents have done to you. Oh, I guess you could make excuses for them. Your sister is chronically ill, and while being a parent is a full time job, being a parent to a chronically ill child makes you a prisoner to the illness. Nobody wants to be a prioner. No one asks for that. I wish that hadn’t happened ot your sister or anyone’s sister or brother or mother or dad.

That being said, it’s a terrible thing your parents have done to you. It’s so awful I wrote it twice. I may even write it a third time.

It’s a terrible thing your parents have done to you.”

“I am rich and famous, but thtat’s not why my opinion counts for more. THe real reason is that I know things other people don’t know. Mystic secrets and hidden knowledge, the sort of stuff men in fedoras kill and die for.”

“‘Bit old school there, yeah? Don’t use a computer?’

‘Too quiet,’ Jack said. ‘I need something loud enough to cover the sound of my characters screaming for help.’”

“‘God — or whoever is in charge of this planet — got drunk on the job one day and decided to give me the gift of writing. The way I see it, I have two choices. I can set that gift on a high shelf so it won’t get dinged up and nobody can make fun of me for playing with it.’ He smiled until the crinkles at the corners of his eyes were deep enough to hide state secrets. ‘Or I can have fun with it and play with the gift I was given until the engine burns out and the wheels come off. I decided to play.’”

“‘People think I put myself into my own books, that I’m the Mastermind. I’m not. Not really. I’m always the child, forever the child, scared but hopeful, dreaming someone will be able to grant my wish someday.’”

“Jack smiled his Mona Lisa smile. He had the mind of an author, always seeing ten, twenty, a hundred pages ahead of the rest of the world.”

“Three things no one has ever said about me: You make it look so easy. You are very mysterious. You need to take yourself more seriously.” — Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“Tim seemed so secure in his relationship with God that he wasn’t threatened by anything — he was at ease with disagreement and difference, he did not fret over the future of the church, he did not even fear death. Some Christian critics say that the ‘Tim Keller model’ of engagement, his winsome, gentle approach to those with whom he disagreed, is outdated. They say that increased secularization and progressive hostility toward traditional Christianity requires the faithful to hit back, respond in kind, dominate or humiliate those who oppose us. But Tim wasn’t kind, gentle and loving to others as some sort of strategy to win the culture wars, grow his church or achieve a particular result. . . . [These attributes] are not a part of a brand. They are not a way to sell books, gain power, win culture wars or ‘take back America for Christ.’ Tim inhabited these ways of being, not as a means to any end, but as a response to his relationship with God and love for his neighbor.” — Tish Harrison Warren, on Tim Keller

“I would recognize you in total darkness, were you mute and I deaf. I would recognize you in another lifetime entirely, in different bodies, different times. And I would love you in all of this, until the very last star in the sky burnt out into oblivion.” — Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”

“The land of fairy-story is wide and deep and high, and is filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both sorrow and joy as sharp as swords. In that land a man may (perhaps) count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very riches and strangeness make dumb the traveller who would report it. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates shut and the keys be lost. The fairy gold too often turns to withered leaves when it is brought away. All I can ask is that you, knowing these things, will receive my withered leaves, as a token that my hand at least once held a little of the gold.”

“The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale — or otherworld — setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

“This is part of a much larger project for Tolkien. He saw the world as broken, but his interest was in trying to making it whole again. He believed healing is possible (specifically, he believed healing is possible through Christ, because his Catholic faith was a central part of who he was) and he wrote his fantasy to explore that conviction. This is the core thing that separates his art, and therefore the promiscuous body of commercial fantasy written in imitation of his art, from the High Modernist stream. And it’s this that brings me back to Greek tragedy, and the reason why it so captured my spirit back when I was young: an individual broken, in my various unexceptional if painful ways, as I was and am; living in a society fragmented in a larger and more dangerous manner as we all are. The thought that healing might be possible evidently spoke to me profoundly, as it continues to do.” — Adam Roberts

“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” — J.R.R. Tolkien

The Ogress and the Orphans, by Kelly Barnhill

“Books are funny things. The ideas and knowledge contained inside their pages have mass and velocity and gravity. They been both space and time. They have minds of their own. There is a power in a book that surpasses even that of a dragon.”

“The more she gave away, the more abundance multiplied, which meant she could give even more.”