Lisa > Lisa's Quotes

“—I think he died for me, she answered.”
― James Joyce, The Dead (A Novella)

“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.”
― James Joyce, The Dead (A Novella)

“Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.”
― James Joyce, The Dead (A Novella)

“He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, The Dead (A Novella)

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“And Will? Why, he’s the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they’re not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it’s not that. It’s just, you know, seeing them pass, that’s how they’ll be all their life; they’ll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“I’m never going to own anything can hurt me.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.   So vague, yet so immense. He did not want to live with it. Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it all the rest of his life.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“I acknowledge all of my feelings and accept that they are natural expressions of the grief over losing you. I am angry about what caused you to die. I want to shake my fist or scream at the caregivers who did not save your life. I am angry with God for taking you away too soon. It upsets me that you left this world even though I still needed you. What can I say or think or do to forgive myself or others for not being able to stop you from dying?”
― Linda Anderson, Saying Goodbye to Your Angel Animals: Finding Comfort after Losing Your Pet

“You were an important part of my life, and I feel an overpowering grief and sadness over your loss. My life is affected in simple and profound ways. I am hurting emotionally, physically, and mentally. I am often distracted and unfocused during my regular workday. My sadness over missing you leaves me numb and unmotivated. What are the things that I miss the most, now that you are gone? What are my thoughts and feelings as I try to perform daily activities? What are the responsibilities and items on my todo list that I can put on the back burner while my attention is diverted by your death?”
― Linda Anderson, Saying Goodbye to Your Angel Animals: Finding Comfort after Losing Your Pet

“Why remember? Because remembering honors. Remembering heals. Remembering forgives. Remembering creates appreciation and gratitude — two of the most wondrous salves for your sorrows.”
― Linda Anderson, Saying Goodbye to Your Angel Animals: Finding Comfort after Losing Your Pet

“What significant details do you remember about how you met your special animal? Why do you think this animal came into your life at the time he or she did?”
― Linda Anderson, Saying Goodbye to Your Angel Animals: Finding Comfort after Losing Your Pet

“You came into my life in a way that unmistakably told me to bring you home. But I think we chose each other. This was one of the best decisions I ever made.”
― Linda Anderson, Saying Goodbye to Your Angel Animals: Finding Comfort after Losing Your Pet

“For us there is little to say. After all, we know that death belongs to life, that it is unavoidable and comes when it wants.”
― Katie Roiphe, The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End

“What he means here is that he had thought his sons would die in the war and had readied himself for the loss. His faith in preparation is central: Freud’s barely submerged premise is that death is something to be mastered, something that one prepares for or practices. “If you would endure life,” he wrote in one of his essays, “be prepared for death.”
― Katie Roiphe, The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Four thousand years ago, the Hindu Vedas described cremation as necessary for a trapped soul to be released from the impure dead body.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“I am a superficial woman of depth.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I think it’s time for you to drop back into my life, ruin it, then disappear again: a love story. The”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I was very boys club, very not attached.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays