Bill Clegg > Quotes

“Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it's to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to help him clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don't think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“[W]e’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Judgement is often no more than a confession of ignorance.”
― Bill Clegg

“Some trees love an ax, a drunk old-timer mumbled one night at the Tap, back when she still went there, and something in what he said rang true, but when she later remembered what he'd said, she disagreed and though instead that the tree gets used to the ax, which has nothing to do with love. It settles into being chipped away at, bit by bit, blade by blade, until it doesn't feel anything anymore, and then, because nothing else can happen, what's left crumbles to dust.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“This is the pivot between youth and age, the
thrilling place where everything seems visible, feels possible, where plans are made. On the one side you have childhood and adolescence, which are the murky ascent, and, on the other, you have the decline that is adulthood, old age, the inch-by-inch reckoning of that grand, brief vision with earthbound reality.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Wounds can sing a beguiling song.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“I’ve never been one to go to church, but I’ve al was ways believed in a creative intelligence behind the ongoing riddle of the world.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“There are no words precise enough to describe how wide and empty the world is when you lose someone that matters to you as much as Penny did to me.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Some people, she decided, magically surface in these horrible moments knowing exactly what to do, which spaces to fill.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“I never felt so small, so humbled, by the vastness of the universe and the fragility of life.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Why is it only later that things begin to make sense?”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“And if the only thing you can do is show up, do it. Then do it again. And when it’s the last thing you want to do and the last place you want to go, go. Just go. You have no idea who you might be helping just by sitting there or who might help you.”
― Bill Clegg, Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery

“I knew I didn’t want to be alone anymore.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“If you want to lose sleep at night and eliminate all your free time or freedom, by all means open a small business, especially one that serves food.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“All we can do is play our parts and keep each other company.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes... Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you... And good people might even ask you to marry them... I don't think we get to know why.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“The world’s magic sneaks up on you in secret, settles next to you when you have your head turned.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“When you see someone every day for a while, you settle into a rhythm and you come to count on them even if for nothing more than the fifteen minutes each morning they spend sitting at your counter, on one of your stools, talking about the weather and giving you a big smile and thumbs-up when they sink their teeth into a poppy-seed muffin.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“This is a half-life, a split purgatory where her body and mind coexist but occupy separate realities.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Det er blitt sent på ettermiddagen da hun kaster et dvelende blikk på byen hun har bodd i hele livet, der hun ikke har venner, ikke familie, men der føttene hennes er navngjetne blant fortauene.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Mimi and I don’t speak a word to each other. Not out of anger or punishment, but we’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Det forekom meg den kvelden og senere at vi ikke lenger bor i en småby, i hvert fall ikke en ordentlig en. Vi bor i et fasjonabelt museum, et som bare er åpent i helgene, og vi er vaktmestrene.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“And the stories will change and the canoe will become a headboard and the family will be mermaids and the rooms will be mansions. And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“It is never said, but it is clear that it is over, that our lives, bound together for so long, will now be lived apart. Everything that we were, the whole magical, horrible opera, is now over. We are only a table apart but we’re in different worlds. He seems less like a person and more like a figment from a dream I once had, some nocturnal wonder I cannot revive after sleep, only remember.”
― Bill Clegg, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man: A Memoir

“Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it's to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“For a while the world will appear more as it is and less as I make it, and I will have a new courage to face the remaining wreckage of the past.”
― Bill Clegg, Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery

“And the waves will sound to them as they did to us the first time we heard them.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Who had been fighting with someone they loved?
Going at it long enough to unleash the irretrievable words they knew to say only because they had been trusted to know what would hurt the most.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Pru asked if she was okay, and June answered with a question that seemed to Pru more of a comment on June's struggles with Lolly: Did you ever have a family? ... Pru told us that night that she'd never felt as grateful. That her answer to June's question had been yes, but not as a commiseration, or an explanation of fatigue, as it seemed to be for June, but both as an acknowledgment of great fortune and a prayer of thanks. With Mike on the line from Tacoma, and Mimi and I huddled over her iPhone on speaker in the kitchen, Pru whispered to us, Thank you.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family