Jenny > Recent Status Updates

‘Eat it, smoke it, stay up all night for it because the memories of the damage you wreak upon your body when you are young will sustain your spirit when you are old.’

‘Just look at us, all of us, quietly doing our thing and trying to matter. The earnestness is inspiring and heartbreaking at the same time.’ p. 121

‘You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it. Someone makes a promise, and then they break it. A play gets good notices, and then it folds. A marriage looks strong, and then they divorce. For a while there’s no war, and then there’s another war. If you get too upset about it all, you become a stupid, unhappy person...’

‘But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world.’

‘It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.’

‘[That] wrecked me and felled the long-growing tree of my belief. I sat there, reduced to a stump, wondering what would become of me.’

‘There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.’

‘As much as they collectively knew about how hard it is to be human, she thought then that they must also know something deeper about how special it is, how beautiful. Why else would they react with such joy to the existence of one of their own, starting out?’

‘What’s the point of anyone’s search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s.’

‘He wouldn’t have called himself an atheist; an atheist required more belief than he had, a kind of determined certainty about mystery that he didn’t think was feasible or possible, admirable or even desirable.’

‘If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only bc human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.’

‘Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I’ve only found sorrow.’

‘Grief and resilience live together.’

‘Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.’

‘As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.’

‘In the past, I hadn’t understood what made people flag birthdays, let alone with parties—celebrating death’s advent, I though.’

‘I wanted you three to grow with an awareness of God, with that order and compass and comfort it provided, safe from the dangers I could not imagine and could not protect you from.’

‘She was stunned and stunned again by them, and her love for them. How much had been lost? Never made it into her memory, never been captured in a photograph?’

‘Our children are not our own as our lives are not our own. All are a loan from God, His temporary gift.’

‘What is the use of all of this living if we don’t stop once in a while to notice what is actually happening...’