Jan Grue > Quotes

“A diagnosis is intimate. It is a conclusion. If it is given after years of uncertainty, it can seem liberating. It affirms that all the worries were not unnecessary, that there was, in fact, something wrong; it proves that your own perception of reality is the right one and that you can be trusted. It can put one at ease. If a diagnosis describes a progressive condition, it can also be a source of unease. It conjures images of the future. It is a road map to a place you don’t want to visit. A diagnosis has its own gravitational field. It can shape identity, like other weighty concepts—gender, sexual orientation. One who has never been diagnosed is free without knowing it. What happens when a diagnosis vanishes suddenly? Something is gone, but it was never there, and that which remains is the same as before.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“We tell each other about the books we read. We both want to know what the other is thinking, but we also like hearing ourselves doing the telling. Each new book is an exploration, and through the telling we reinforce the feeling of having traveled some distance, of having gained new land.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“Our life together is not an illustration, it is not a demonstration of any moral or philosophical point, we are not the solution to an ethical dilemma.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“I felt the feeling of freedom that comes from canceling plans, not living up to expectations, of instead choosing to do what is truly necessary.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“Those who are constantly exposed to moral experiences can also be expected to offer an opportunity of moral instruction for others.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“Sue had a kind of warmth and presence that I encountered multiple times in California. Eventually, I began to think of it as the presence that one strives for when remembering that time is short. For everyone.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“The aristocratic element is characterized by not needing to explain oneself. It is to write, as Didion did about California and Hawaii, as if one has always been at home there, as if one knows all there is to know, as if history and the world are self-evidently one’s own, a familiar heirloom, an art object that’s been in the family for as far back as anyone can recall. Stephen Fry said that Diana Mosley once told him: Of course, you never knew Hitler, did you?”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“It could have been different. It always could have been different. But who would I have been if I hadn’t been born with a muscular disease? There is a lived life and there is an unlived life, and the lived life contains the unlived one as water contains an air bubble.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“Never tell me the odds, as Han Solo once said.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“My ethics teacher taught me the term liminal phase. It describes the most vulnerable part of a rite of passage, the point at which one finds oneself between worlds. It is the period in which a young person is no longer a child, though not yet an adult, or when the dead have abandoned the world of the living but cannot yet be counted as ancestors. During these phases, things can go drastically wrong. But they are also where transformation takes place. We come into being in these phases. Without them, the world could not go on.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“Opp igjen!”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours

“Into the unknown; we do not know where we are headed. We sail in a leaking vessel, aware we are dying animals. We dream of Byzantium, bailing with all our strength, we sail together. We are argonauts, cosmonauts, adventurers, explorers. We are on a journey.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“Diagnosis is not fate. But it's easy to believe that it is.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours

“In fiction, physical dexterity can be traded for mental ability, body can be sacrificed for mind. Odin gave an eye for a gulp of wisdom. Professor X from X-Men had to be paralyzed in order to acquire his telepathic abilities. I’ve met people who believe I’ve made a similar decision, either before or after my birth. They would like for a cathedral of meaning to loom over all of it, that every life should be formed by an inner, moral logic.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“I have had to learn to dial down my tendency to self-censor because it’s better to be furious in the moment than to try to back out and set oneself up as the judge.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“It isn’t my fault that my body is the way it is; it isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s no secret that my body is the way it is. And, most important: I’m allowed to feel sad that this is so.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“Most of my twenties were behind me by the time I could put such thoughts into words. It was like finally recognizing a face I had been seeing in dreams for years.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“It’s often as simple as that. Other people like to help. They don’t know how exactly, but they’re willing. Some of them are good at lifting, others are not as good. Some of them keep their distance, others are stiff and nervous. This is not what I need. I need someone who gets up close enough to recognize where I am weak and where I am strong, which direction I’m able to bend if and when I am in the process of losing my balance. It often comes down to chance, but those who are best at supporting me are often those who have small children, who are used to carrying someone else, used to bodies that are weaker than their own. Breathe in.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

“I cannot step outside myself, I cannot fully become the normality that stares at difference. But I can try. And in the attempt something else might arise, something unpredictable.”
― Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours