Repair Quotes

“We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven't had any tea for a week...
The bottom is out of the Universe.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling

“The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can leave us feeling dead inside, with little or no ability to feel our feelings in our bodies. The process of repair demands a re-association with the body, a commitment to dive into the body and feel today what we couldn’t feel yesterday because it was too dangerous.”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence

“An apology is the superglue of life! It can repair just about anything!!”
― Lynn Johnston

“Trust is not a gasoline-soaked blanket that succumbs to the matches of betrayal, never able to be used for its warmth again; it’s a tapestry that wears thin in places, but can be patched over if you have the right materials, circumstances, and patience to repair it. If you don’t, you’re always the one who feels the coldest when winter comes.”
― A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar

“The only way to make a spoilt machine work again is to break it down, work on its inner system and fix it again. Screw out the bolts of your life, examine and work on yourself, fix your life again and get going.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I suppose we go out to sea because we want, eventually, to come home. I know this now, but it was new to me then. The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while. Then, when it is gone, you can know what it is. You can yearn to return to it. It is a form of wounding. You welcome the scar so it will remind you of where you once were.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Not a single atom in our bodies today was there when we were children. Every bit of us has been replaced many times over. We flake away and become new. Whatever we are now, we are not the stuff from which we were originally made. All the people we once were. All the people we had once hoped to be.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“The most casual things can, after all, twist our tired hearts.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“It was no great surprise that the world felt as if it were in chains since they actually trawled the ocean floor and tied us up in easy knots.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“If the ocean was a bank, they’d have saved it a long time ago.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Who can say where anything truly begins? The cloud, the raindrop, the original speck of dust around which water collects? We can only ever locate the middle when we get to the end. And then, at the absolute end, what’s the point in finding the middle, or even the beginning?”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Just because the truth is ignored doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Stupid to think that our wine will never turn.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“I have learned how easy it is to condescend when you don’t participate.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the sea floor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Nothing, not even words, can stop the flow of time.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Who knows what it was that the cable was carrying at the time, all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations, the theories, the chess games, the sea charts, the histories, the contracts, the divorce papers, the computer hacks, the wild lies, the voices, the terror, the nonsense, the known, the unknown, the promises, the porn, the alphabet of flesh, the sing-song of skin, the million wisps of disinformation, the flotsam of our longings, the jetsam of our truths, all of it, all, suspended in a series of wet tubes at the bottom of the ocean floor.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“So much of who we are is who we cannot be. We flatter ourselves when we think we can become something entirely new.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“It was a boat, a small boat, an older boat, not much more than the length of a couple of blue whales, and there was one intention, the story immemorial: to survive the harpoon, skip the vortex, complete the job, and get back to where we came from.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“More life on the bottom of the ocean than anywhere else. In the vents. The layers. The currents. Things down there betray all the categories.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“The tubes are tiny. They are hollow. They weigh nothing. All they carry is light. I can’t presume to explain this. It is one of the things that still continues to fill me with wonder.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“All that traffic on the floor of the unknown.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“I was hooked on the plot of the waves.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“She whispered my name and she sounded like the first person ever to say it.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“I felt myself floating towards the shadow of the dreamer I once had been.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Of all of society's institutions, education has brought us to the current state of poor relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; but if it is education that created this mess, it will be education that will get us out of it. We know that making things better will not happen overnight. It will take generations. That's how the damage was created and that's how the damage will be fixed. But if we agree on the objective of reconciliation, and agree to work together, the work we do today will immeasurably strengthen the social fabric of Canada tomorrow.”
― Murray Sinclair, Who We Are: Four Questions For a Life and a Nation

“When I can see you as a person who did something that resulted in harm without seeing you as an essentially evil person, I am more likely to advocate for strategies that include your well-being in the repair that is being sought.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

“When we name the huge costs and disparities that result from practices embedded in white supremacy beliefs, we bring to life an awareness of the practices, not the practices themselves. With greater awareness, we can seek to eradicate them. Communities that don’t collect or track data on race in education, housing, employment, and more might find it easy to say that they don’t have problems with race. However, with the statistics gathered by Equal Justice Initiative and other organizations, it’s clear that these problems do exist, but there is no way to talk about them without it being dismissed as anecdotal.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy