Heather B Blair > Heather's Quotes

“Everybody says women are like water. I think it's because water is the source of life, and it adapts itself to its environment. Like women, water also gives of itself wherever it goes to nurture life....”
― Xinran, The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices

“What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“Grief is what tells you who you are alone.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“in all the years i had blundered along in search of my own footing, she had never given me an inkling of this wish. unburdened by the demands of history or anyone else's dreams, i had wandered toward and finally reached a world far outside the plains i loved and loathed. my mother had neither begrudged me this journey nor expected it, certain that i had to make my own way. but she packed my toolbox with her great wit and forbearance before i went, and she stashed there, for long safekeeping, her desire.”
― Gail Caldwell, A Strong West Wind

“Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there's nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That's where we get our children from, that's how the human race goes forward. And if it's too late for children, there's the companionship of a safe and trusted person.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It's the currency by which everything is valued.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he's your brother. That's how it can be borne.”
― Anne Tyler

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“If you choose to do the right thing, it's a conscious decision at first. Then it becomes second nature. You don't have to think about what is right because doing the right thing becomes who you are, like a reflex. Your actions with time become your character”
― J.L. Witterick, My Mother's Secret

“I always thought that courageous people were those who were not afraid. Meeting Franciszka and her daughter, I realize that courageous people are afraid like everyone else. They just act despite the fear.”
― J.L. Witterick, My Mother's Secret

“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”
― Sydney J. Harris

“It has been my experience that rewarding and heartbreaking often go hand in hand.”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s

“Life is a boomerang - what you do for others comes back to you.”
― Mother Antonia

“Everything you do either adds to the beauty of the world or takes away from it.”
― Mother Antonia

“Life is not a series of green lights.”
― Mother Antonia

“Forgiving is hard, but not forgiving is harder”
― Mother Antonia

“No Man Is An Island; Every Book Is A World.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“The words you can't find, you borrow.
We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry