Status Updates From This Is Happiness

p. 368: “I felt the loss of him even before he had gone. Which is, I suppose, as good as any a description of love.”

p.368: “By that time, my grandparents’ house would be another of those tumbledown triangles of mossy masonry you see everywhere in the western countryside, the life that was in them once all but escaping imagining.”

p. 356: “I was grateful then to have the prayers in me. There have been times throughout my life when I’ve felt the same, that because of my childhood and education, the prayers were things available to me, and I suppose there are few lives that don’t encounter moments when all that is available is drawn down and clung to.”

p. 335-336: “I went because grief has to find a home, has to find a place to settle, or the dark wings will overwhelm you and you will fall down in the road. I went into St. Cecilia‘s because when you come face-to-face with suffering you have to negotiate…

“…I knelt into the pew furthest from the altar and looked up.

“‘It’s me,’ I said.”

“‘There’s nothing wrong with you, but for what’s wrong with you.’”

p. 284-285: “The apprentice lover has to make it up as he or she goes along, they think no one has ever felt like this before. ‘Others have loved, yes, but not like this’ is textbook. We all feel we are originals, maybe at the moment when we are most universal.”

p. 283-284: “It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say _This is happiness_, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.”

“This was more or less the philosophy of Tess Grogan, who, well into her nineties, kept the finest garden in Faha. ‘We lost a garden,’ she’d say, speaking of the time of Adam like it wasn’t so long ago, pressing gently the swollen joints of her arthritic fingers and smiling sagacious smile of the nonagenarian, ‘We lost a garden, our whole lives we have to remake it.’”

“The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it, but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say ‘All right then, I have tried’ and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and, until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better.”

“The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws, both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you’ll all but guarantee an easier path, because it’s a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment.”

“Now, as far as I was concerned, there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart.”