Max Porter > Quotes

“Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred-foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park, enjoying her view. Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her. How physical my missing is. I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her. Eugh,”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“And the boys were behind me, a tide-wall of laughter and yelling, hugging my legs, tripping and grabbing, leaping, spinning, stumbling, roaring, shrieking and the boys shouted I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU and their voice was the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?”
― Max Porter, Lanny

“Again. I beg everything again.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“[Grief] is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.

The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying ‘OH NO YOU DON’T COCK-CHEEK’. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).

She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).

And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.

I will stop finding her hairs.


I will stop hearing her breathing.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“I plucked one feather from my hood and left it on his forehead, for, his, head.

For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning.

For a little break in the mourning.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone. She”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“...we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum. So when he told us what happened I don't know what my brother was thinking but I was thinking this:
Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this? Where are the strangers going out of their way to help, screaming, flinging bits of emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment at us to try and settle us and save us?
There should be men in helmets speaking a new and dramatic language of crisis. There should be horrible levels of noise, completely foreign and inappropriate for our cosy London flat.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“And she laughed, and said she understood, and then off she drifted in that nice way she has. Responsive to the light, I would call it. The type of person who is that little bit more akin to the weather than most people, more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be. Which explains Lanny.”
― Max Porter, Lanny

“She was beaten to death, I once told some
boys at a party.
Oh shit mate, they said.
I lie about how you died, I whispered to
Mum.
I would do the same, she whispered back.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“We are but pitiful narrative creatures... obsessing over the agony of not knowing. Sisyphus, Atlas, Echo, all those poor souls, now us. It is the oldest story of them all; never-ending pain.”
― Max Porter, Lanny

“Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“What good is a crow to a pack of grieving humans? A huddle. A throb.              A sore.                          A plug.                                       A gape.                                                    A load. A gap. So, yes. I do eat baby rabbits, plunder nests, swallow filth, cheat death, mock the starving homeless, misdirect, misinform. Oi, stab it! A bloody load of time wasted. But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“I’m a million cameras, even when I’m sleeping, clicking, clicking, every second something is growing and changing. We are little arrogant flashes in a grand magnificent scheme.”
― Max Porter, Lanny

“This is the rotten core, the Grünewald, the nails in the hands, the needle in the arm, the trauma, the bomb, the thing after which we cannot ever write poems, the slammed door, the in-principio-erat-verbum. Very What-the-fuck. Very blood-sport. Very university historical. But don’t stop looking.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“And then our Mum and Dad were in love and they were truly dry-stone strong and durable and people speak of ease and joy and spontaneity and the fact that their two smells became one smell, our smell. Us.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“MAN I would be done grieving? BIRD    No, not at all. You were done being hopeless. Grieving is something you’re still doing, and something you don’t need a crow for.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“Once upon a time there were two boys who purposefully misremembered things about their father. It made them feel better if ever they forgot things about their mother.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can't, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me. CROW”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“I remember a story about an Irish warrior who killed his son by mistake but when he realised he didn’t mind that much because it served the son right.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest. DAD”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“He feels colossally sad.

Blisteringly sad.

Almost ecstatically sad.”
― Max Porter, Shy

“A howling sorry which is yes which is thank you which is onwards.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers