Laura Grace Weldon

“Hearing, they say, is one of the last senses to go. My mother smiled. I tearfully asked her, "Mommy, can you see heaven?" She smiled again. Then she was gone. There was no death rattle, no sudden in-breath or out-breath. She simply stopped breathing. She smiled and slipped away. Smiling while dying is apparently not that unusual. The body tries to produce a state of euphoria to usher us out. It releases the same kinds of neurochemicals, dopamine and serotonin, that flood our brains as we are falling in love.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

“I began to wonder if he was not very consciously and deliberately choosing particular chapters of his life to tell, in order to tell me other things, perhaps --- about the nature and power of stories, about how decisions not only reflect but create character, about how stories actually shape our lives; could it be that the words we choose to have resident in our mouths act as a sort of mysterious food, and soak down into our blood and bones, and form that which we wish to be?”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“They were loath to leave, for they felt, understandably enough, and rightly, I think, that as soon as they left their place, they were no longer quite themselves, but shadows or ghost, unrooted and uprooted .... the Kwakwaka'wakw mourned the loss of everything they knew in the most tactile and sensual way, the scents and sounds, the way the mist slid in and out of the firs, the wail of gulls, the sheen of seals, the melancholy exhalation of whales sliding by under the terrific stars. The clawing mud, the sift of sand, the scrabble of pebbles in the surf; the plain of owls, the scent of cedar, the bite of huckleberries from a certain thicket in a certain season --- they were convinced that these things were part and parcel of their being, and who is to gainsay them?”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.”
― Neil Gaiman