Gaby > Gaby's Quotes

“That's the deal we make when we love someone, isn't it? Somewhere along the path one person is going to have to find a way to carry on without the other”
― Josie Silver, The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

“If I live a million lifetimes, I’ll find you in all of them.”
― Josie Silver, The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Empathy is a liar. It seduces us with the impression of selflessness, yet whatever feelings we think we can fathom are confined by the extent of our own hearts. We are living on our own, in our separate bodies.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“Loss came in all shapes and forms, but it hadn't occurred to me until now that you could lose the things you never had.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“We are all like trees, our heads swaying in the wind, our roots buried in the ground, unseen by anyone and at times forgotten even by ourselves.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“Were there people who could say with unwavering certainty that they liked what they lived for -- even on days when they wanted to destroy all of it -- if such people existed, then I wouldn't hesitate to throw myself away and become one of them.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“I wished there was a way for him to understand that he was more than just a shadow that emerged and faded with the light, and if he denied his existence, then he'd also be rejecting the part of me that had become so deeply entwined with him. And I couldn't allow him to reduce that part of me to nothing but a fantasy.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“Our fates have been melded together in a way that can never be undone.
Like a game of tug of war, I'm afraid that I'm pulling you into my world, and I'm being drawn into yours.
Soon we will both fall somewhere in the middle and lose touch as to what it is we're searching for.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“He had given me something, but took it away before my hands could warm it up. I couldn’t even identify what it was I no longer had.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“The way I see it,' she said, 'he can't expect anyone to understand his pain just by knowing what he's been through. Nobody knows how another person handles pain. That's why we move our lips and tell each other how we feel. If he's pretended all his life that he's come out of the past unscathed, then he can't blame his mother for believing in a strength he's only pretended to have.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“We pour a bit of ourselves into everything we do, every note we play, I thought, and unwittingly, one fragment at a time, we leave ourselves in the past.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“That day will come years later, during a stifling summer, when he will find himself back at this courtyard letting out a loud, frenzied cry over what he has learned today, as though he is learning it for the first time.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“But even a dream would become real if you come back to it often enough.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“We weren't made with endless time between our fingers like noodles we can stretch as much as we see fit. Even the most resilient noodles break at some point. It is the most ordinary and the most profound thing in the world.”
― An Yu, Ghost Music

“Instead she thinks: I love him, and for a moment it doesn't matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Eventually she looked down at her empty hands and thought: Damn it. Damn it, I love him. Then, after the smoke cleared, she could see nothing else.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“That old reflex never died; the little pang of Don't go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun.
Don't go, don't go, don't go.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Life is a succession of shipwrecks.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Heartbeat Library

“Something about that memory moved him. It revealed the foresight of memory which, without us noticing, records life and presents it to us when we are finally able to understand it.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Heartbeat Library

“My whole life I have not stopped accumulating evidence to stop things from disappearing, and, in the end, I have done nothing but reinforce their disappearance, accentuate the vision of this loss.” —CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Heartbeat Library

“There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is
all of life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“If people took some simple pleasure in reality (which is entirely independent of time), they would never have needed to come up with the idea that they could ever again lose anything with which they had truly bonded. No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“It is still this death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which bears down heavily on the life that had been ours so that this death becomes a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and permeating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“I hope that somewhere in the thicket of your sprawling pain you may come upon the small spring that has already cried all the tears before, and, indeed, for you in advance.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“And while I am completely engulfed in my sadness, I am happy to sense that you exist, beautiful one. I am happy to have flung myself without fear into your beauty just as a bird flings itself into space. I am happy, dear, to have walked with steady faith on the waters of our uncertainty all the way to that island which is your heart and where pain blossoms. Finally: happy.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“The sleeping and the waking, the bright and the dark, the voice and the silence... la présence et l'absence. All the presumed opposites which converge somewhere in one point where they sing the hymn of their union--and this place is, for the time being, our heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“You don’t get over death,’ I said. ‘You swallow it inside you. And your grief forms a layer of you. Because that’s what we are, layer on layer of experience,”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“saudade – a yearning for a happiness that has passed, or perhaps never existed.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“We were both looking for something we couldn’t have again. The past.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers