vmorah > vmorah's Quotes

“Mayu had been failing her whole life. Her constant competition with Reyem had prepared her well for the trial she was about to endure.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves

“Love was the destroyer. It made mourners, widows, left misery in its wake. Grief and love were one and the same. Grief was the shadow love left when it was gone.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves

“He’d read enough books and seen enough plays to understand what a father was meant to be—someone kind and steady who dispensed wisdom and taught you how to wield a sword and throw a punch. Actually, in most plays, the fathers got killed off and had to be avenged, but they certainly seemed wise and loving in the first act.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves

“Trauma seems to provoke this dichotomy, this corporeal confusion, as it were. It’s both: gratitude for what is and utter despair for what isn’t (and what could have been).”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“Within a matter of days, it was time to leave the house;”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“One of the most insufferable and surprising parts of grief is that one moment we can’t stand to feel our sadness for another second, and the next we are scared of ever losing the intensity of that feeling. That somehow the passage of time, and the eventual lessening of the sting, is an affront to the memory of the one we lost.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“Anxiety has the capacity to temporarily steal joy. It can wrangle the mind—baiting it to singularly focus on negative possibilities, whether true or false. In so doing, anxiety surreptitiously stomps out a spectrum of other feelings that actually exist simultaneously.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“We aren’t necessarily meant to “move on” from these life-altering moments in a linear way. It is in fact normative, natural, and okay—more than okay—to sit in our grief, even when it feels as sharp as the day it first touched us. We aren’t supposed to “move on,” “be positive,” or “push ahead” overnight.”
― Jessica Zucker, I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Too bad. I am exactly the kind of ice-blooded, rotten-hearted girl he fears I am. And I am fine with that. May he stay unsettled.”
― Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow

“If Mama taught me anything, it was that what other people think is of paramount importance.”
― Claire Alexander, Meredith, Alone

“Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“newspapers weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Mourning is a self-absorbed business;”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“No scholar, no matter how clever or meticulous, can map smoke and myth onto the page.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Weller calls the fifth gate ancestral grief. “This is the grief we carry in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our ancestors. . . . Tending this undigested grief of our ancestors not only frees us to live our own lives but also eases ancestral suffering in the other world.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“It’s funny how quickly you descend from civilized young lady to madwoman; it was as if this beastly, boundaryless creature had been living just beneath my skin for years, lashing her tail. But there are places built for holding beastly women.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“It is such a scholar’s impulse, to cope with a dangerous and murky situation by sitting at his desk and writing a list.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“the place you are born isn't necessarily the place you belong.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“We live, however, in a grief-phobic and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“Grief dares us to love once more. —TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“Mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw says that “we are addicted to disclosure.”59 And yet this pseudo-contact leaves us feeling unseen in the most essential ways.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“I understand that when it comes to campus diversity, the ideal would be to achieve something resembling what’s often shown on college brochures—smiling students working and socializing in neat, ethnically blended groups. But even today, with white students continuing to outnumber students of color on college campuses, the burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students. In my experience, it’s a lot to ask.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“HOME GRADUALLY BEGAN TO FEEL more distant, almost like a place in my imagination.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful—a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan