Ben Reeves > Quotes

“Imagine for a one moment that you're in the future. Your future. These are your last moments before death.......Now, imagine I give you a final gift. You're allowed to go back. Just for twenty minutes, you're allowed to go back to the exact moment where you're reading these words. This is your twenty-minute gift. Do not waste it. You can't change your life in twenty minutes, so don't try. No-do the thing that you'll wish, on your deathbed, you could have done one last time. Something precious.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“if it weren’t all so beautiful, if every tiny thing weren’t so relentlessly fucking beautiful, perhaps I’d be the one with the paperclip, but instead I’ll wander through it alone, blessed with every friend there is.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“And it sneaks up on me this sensation. A sensation of deepest comfort. Here we are, doing small things, nothing really, just talking, watching television. And yet in the nothingness there is a life more real than any wedding or christening or birthday party. In these tiny moments, when the spectacle is stripped away, when there is no reason for the day, what's left appears to be something true, something fundamental to being a person.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“But life isn't a house, is it? It's more like a hotel. And there are good hotels and there are bad hotels, but it's okay because you only stay in each one for a little bit. Maybe you're staying in a nice room with a comfy bed and good food, but the next could be horrible. Or maybe you're in the horrible one, but you know the next one might be better. And you're constantly moving, and things get better, and things get worse. But no matter what - it's not a house. You can't stay there forever.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“It's not that she can't live without him. She just never wanted to. She lived a life with the man she chose and now she's in a new phase, a superfluous phase, where his voice doesn't exist, where his smell doesn't exist. They arrived on this planet separately. They found each other. They spent more years together than apart. And when he left her alone, she was halved, and now she's ready to become no person at all.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“Then she smiles, as though she's thought of something. As if everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, and she closes her eyes. She is peaceful.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“A brick isn't boring. You could look at a brick and be mesmerized-its texture, its shape, all its cracks and blemishes. The cobweb smell, the smooth power it leaves on your fingers.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“and there’s a family, and there’s a family, and it’s perfect and it hurts”
― Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“and I am everywhere and always, and it never stops.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“Life quickens as you age, people told her. Those childhood years are a lifetime, then things accelerate into your twenties and thirties until each year is a month, each month a week—seasons whizzing like Catherine wheels—Christmas after Christmas—terrifying and impossible and unstoppable. But nobody warned her what happens when your husband dies at seventy-four, when you’re seventy-nine. They never told her how those next ten years will last forever. How every day is an exercise in waiting. They never told her that.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“Noah Finch—0 years, 5 months, 29 days”
― Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“But she learnt long ago, there’s no life better than a life shared. To fully give it, and take it, until one isn’t complete without the other.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“Come, one of them says. If this is it, then let’s sip every splash of sun from the air, let’s rinse every drop of life from our bodies, let us dance and love and collide to make new nymphs just as we were made, so they can learn everything we learned, all over again. Yes. Let’s do that. And the mayflies are ecstatic once more. Spin with me, show me how fast you can go, how high. This is our ballet, our opera—spin with me, spin.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“And if it weren’t all so beautiful, if every tiny thing weren’t so relentlessly fucking beautiful,”
― Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“People are extraordinary.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

“And it sneaks up on me – this sensation. A sensation of deepest comfort. Here we are, doing small things, nothing really, just talking, watching television. And yet in the nothingness there is a life more real than any wedding or christening or birthday party. In these tiny moments, when the spectacle is stripped away, when there is no reason for the day, what’s left appears to be something true, something fundamental to being a person.”
― Ben Reeves, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt