Vincent Deary > Quotes

“Some people handle life admirably. And other people really don’t. Some get stuck in hideous deforming places and postures and become ever more unbearable versions of themselves.”
― Vincent Deary, How We Are

“Staying the same is a constant and dynamic process.”
― Vincent Deary, How We Are

“Like the musician's portrait, the person who has become a real part of your life is not located in one part of you, and can never be neatly excised. To really lose the notion of them... Well, how would you? You couldn't lose the picture without destroying the room. In time, however, the furniture will be rearranged and will come to represent other people and places. But the old shapes linger, haunt the room. If you look from a certain angle, you can still see them there. But you move on, your perspective shifts. New friends walk beside you through the streets of Belfast. You practise and perform new routines until, eventually, you can't quite remember how the room used to look or how the streets used to feel when walked in the days of love. That is perhaps the saddest loss of all, and why we want to linger for a while at the end of grief. We don't want to lose the notion.

There is no real forgetting. Everything leaves a mark, whether you remember it, whether you bring it to mind or not. There is no subtraction in mind. Only and.”
― Vincent Deary, How We Are

“Only recently the notion came to me of swimming upstream, against the tide of decay and degradation, the slow and subtle ebbing away of order; the way that every day in every way you and I are getting worse, losing ground, memory, teeth, and the battle just to stay as we are, let alone get better.”
― Vincent Deary, How We Are

“When the weave of your world becomes a knot then maybe it's time for the knife.”
― Vincent Deary, How We Are

“What was the case for you; to whom and what do you owe your soul?”
― Vincent Deary, How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living

“We live in rooms haunted by ourselves.”
― Vincent Deary, How We Are: How to Live Trilogy, Book 1