clem

“I didn't even know, until this second, that I've been protecting this untenable pain, because it's all I have left of her.”
― Cara Bastone, Promise Me Sunshine

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Grief is a relationship...It's the way we figure out how to keep loving them even though they're gone. And in order to do that we have to keep on going. And going and going.' His hold is tighter and tighter and mine is tighter and tighter and I've slid off the desk and into his lap. 'You are not betraying her by healing,' he whispers directly into my ear. 'You are honoring her. You are learning to love her exactly as she is. As someone who isn't here anymore...That's who she is now. And this journey through grief...It's what we do for the great loves of our lives.”
― Cara Bastone, Promise Me Sunshine