Richard Coles > Quotes

“was early, just after opening time, and there were not many people about but a woman, well dressed, stopped me and said, ‘I’m so sorry to hear your news.’ I thanked her, and she told me that she was a widow too. Tears came to my eyes and she took my arm. ‘I know, I know.’ ‘What do I need to know?’ I asked. She thought about that for a moment and said, ‘People will never be as nice to you again as now, so get the most out of it.’ It made me laugh.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“But what he liked most of all about dogs was their innocence of human motives, the self-promoting stratagems and egotism, their affection unstaled by familiarity and reciprocity. This is why the queen surrounds herself with corgis, he sometimes thought: love without deference.”
― Richard Coles, Murder Before Evensong

“When your partner dies they take with them your future.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“Daniel recalled the bishop saying the same thing, that the higher you rise in an organisation, the further you are from what you need to know.”
― Richard Coles, Murder Before Evensong

“like many gay men after a family Christmas, I decided to seek the comfort of strangers, only where could I find a comforting stranger on a freezing cold Christmas night in the middle of Northamptonshire? I pulled into a lay-by, hidden by woodland, expecting it, on this most holy night, to be deserted, but it wasn’t. A car was parked in the darkness, the engine turning over but with no lights on. I parked in front of it, a few yards ahead, and noticed in my rear-view mirror something stir within. The headlights flashed. A signal. I switched on my interior light and switched it off again. After a moment the car’s headlights came on and stayed on. A figure got out and came and stood in front, illuminated by the headlamps. It was a man, doing a dance, and he was completely naked apart from a bow of tinsel, which he had tied round his balls. Merry Christmas, I thought: Happy Feast of the Nativity.”
― Richard Coles, Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went From Pop to Pulpit

“And now it has all gone, and when I look ahead I see nothing.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I understood now how we want to attach our bereavements to bigger bereavements, and to this, the biggest bereavement of all, so that our stories are taken up in this big story, given visibility and importance, and we need that because we fear and know that the death which gradually erases them will come for us and erase us too.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I felt a surge of rage and wanted to scream at him I HAVE JUST LOST THE LOVE OF MY LIFE, CAN’T YOU TELL? Could anyone tell? I felt like a leper in those first days of grief, wrapped in my misfortune, sounding like a broken bell, and contagious with bad luck, so I imagined people kept their distance from me.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“higher you rise in an organisation, the further you are from what you need to know.”
― Richard Coles, Murder Before Evensong

“My first defence against being overwhelmed by grief was organisation.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I was suddenly hit by grief, the blows which come when you find continuing existence in the things that were theirs: name tags, voicemail messages, incoming mail.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“This time my wounds are not visible, and there is no uniform for the bereaved, the black armband, the bordered calling-card, the curtains drawn at noon. Your loss is pretty much invisible, unless people know about it, and you live and walk in the land of the not-yet bereaved, and should your wounds suddenly show people may recoil, or be struck dumb with embarrassment, or inadvertently say the wrong thing.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“vessel of our understanding and exceed the dimensions of the universe itself.”
― Richard Coles, Murder at the Monastery

“I realised that I was a sort of walking social IED, a threat to the unwary, and with the potential to upset everyone unpredictably.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“The piercing grief is less frequent but in its place is an occasional visit from cold, stony grief, that comes up from depths.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“was often the last to know, and when he finally did discover who was doing what with whom it was usually too late to do anything but deal with the damage.”
― Richard Coles, Murder Before Evensong

“But what he liked most of all about dogs was their innocence of human motives, the self-promoting stratagems and egotism, their affection unstaled by familiarity and reciprocity.”
― Richard Coles, Murder Before Evensong: Now a Major TV series: A Canon Clement Mystery

“Chronic illness does this, not only robbing you of the joint enterprise that you loved to do, but turning the solo version of it into something you can no longer enjoy.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“did know that he loved me and that I loved him, and that nothing could have separated us apart from what was separating us, so I did not fret too much about leaving anything unsaid.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“minister from Islington should look like, from dangly earrings to a beatific”
― Richard Coles, Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went From Pop to Pulpit

“I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. One day follows another and I do what I have to do but I feel like I’ve smoked a bale of weed and I am standing in a motorway service station dressed as a velociraptor surrounded by broken crockery and everyone’s gone quiet.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I did find that I remembered who delivered, and who did not, and while I have not trimmed the Christmas card list as a result, I have, without conscious decision, resolved to spend what limited resources of time and attention I have on people who wish to return them in roughly the same proportion.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“I did not know what I wanted to do because I had just been blown up.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“Back in London, Toby and I were asked if we wanted to move into a flat in King’s Cross that had been found by a friend of an exemplary gay radical who had re-spelled his Christian name because it was a ‘Christian’ name and also because he wished to divest it of the male power such gendered things endow. We accepted Greyum’s offer, and”
― Richard Coles, Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went From Pop to Pulpit

“I have found that when someone is dying the convenience of others, denied at first, becomes a more powerful factor in deciding what to do and what not to do, as the hours become days.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“as you live on you realise we are not so much the authors of our lives but a library of other people.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“There are no words …’ There are only words, but they are inadequate, and when people ask me how I am, and want to know, I find it harder and harder to answer.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“It is the worst moment, when you realise what you have woken up to, the opposite of that feeling of immense relief when you wake from a nightmare, then remember it is not real. This is the nightmare you wake into.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“Self-pity is neither attractive nor helpful”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

“they are kind, but everyone flinches at making a faux pas, and at death stepping, trespassing, into their day a little bit.”
― Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss