Robin

“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind - and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Dear Woman,
Sometimes you’ll just be too much woman.
Too smart,
Too beautiful,
Too strong.
Too much of something that makes a man feel like less of a man,
Which will make you feel like you have to be less of a woman.
The biggest mistake you can make
Is removing jewels from your crown
To make it easier for a man to carry.
When this happens, I need you to understand
You do not need a smaller crown—
You need a man with bigger hands.”
― Michael Reid

“I am very concerned
when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of
touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with
memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not,
dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch
with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and
affinity are after all also yours. You must, Sidie (this is the task that this
incomprehensible fate imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside
of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours.
You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on
his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected
of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just
convince you, my dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your
existence”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road