Kathleen MacMahon > Quotes

“That's what I feel like now,' I told him. 'I feel like there's a low hanging wooden beam, right in front of me, and I keep walking slap bang into it. A hundred times a day I walk into that beam, and the pain hits me, right here, between the eyes.'

.....

In time I could have told him that I never did learn to duck to avoid the pain of losing her. What happened was that I found myself stumbling into it less and less often. Imperceptibly at first: whereas at the start it happened to me a hundred times a day, by the time a month had gone by I was struck by the blow of it perhaps only ninety-five times a day. Another month and it hit me only ninety times in a twenty-four-hour period, and by the time a year had passed, there was sometimes a whole hour when I did not collide with the pain of it. It wasn't that it was any less painful when I did, just that the intervals in between got longer and longer. That's how I came to understand that I was healing.”
― Kathleen MacMahon, Nothing but Blue Sky

“Fifty-one years old and still only slowly coming to some understanding of my life, I sat on a beach on the Costa Brava, digesting the terrifying knowledge that we hold in our hands each other's fragile hearts, and can treat them as gently or roughly as we please.”
― Kathleen MacMahon, Nothing but Blue Sky

“A man is tested only a few times in his life, that's what Hugh said afterwards. He will seldom recognise the test when it comes along. And by the time he realises that it was a test, it will be too late. But how he behaves in that moment, that's what defines him. That's the mark of the man.”
― Kathleen MacMahon, This Is How It Ends

“I understood for the first time how correct it was to say that she was 'survived by her husband'. I had seen that expression used in obituaries without ever giving it a thought, but it turned out to be a term of great precision. I had survived Mary Rose only barely. I was struggling to survive her.”
― Kathleen MacMahon, Nothing but Blue Sky

“The pain was still there, the pain was always there, but I had a soothing feeling on top of it, like when you apply a cooling gel to sunburn.”
― Kathleen MacMahon, Nothing but Blue Sky

“didn’t”
― Kathleen MacMahon, This Is How It Ends

“It was exhausting to me, and touching at the same time, how my friends took such care to gather up every morsel of her life. They collated these shards of her history with all the white-glove care of archaeologists gathering up the fragments of some precious artefact.”
― Kathleen MacMahon, Nothing but Blue Sky

“She's a reader, she's always searching out the story”
― Kathleen MacMahon, This Is How It Ends

“We live life forwards, we learn it backwards”
― Kathleen MacMahon, Nothing but Blue Sky

“I know what you're saying, and of course there will be a moment of sadness, always, that Mary Rose isn't there. But the happy occasions will still be happy occasions, because that's how life works. Happiness trumps sadness, every time. If it didn't, we couldn't survive.”
― Kathleen MacMahon, Nothing but Blue Sky