Taylor Edwards > Recent Status Updates

“And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank. The bliss which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy shone around this youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad nor old. They transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two first dwellers in it.” Ch 22, The Flower of Eden

“Do you love me?” asked Holgrave. “If we love one another, the moment has room for nothing more. Let us pause upon it, and be satisfied. Do you love me, Phœbe?”
“You look into my heart,” said she, letting her eyes drop. “You know I love you!”
Ch 20, The Flower of Eden

Ch 42 “Baby, there’s justice and there’s mercy. If you’re not sure what to do, and you’ve got to choose one or the other, I’d say always go the mercy way. If you make a mistake, make it for mercy. Bad mercy don’t hurt nearly like bad justice.”

Ch 35 “There is no virtue in advertising one’s sadness, but there is no wisdom in denying it either. And there is a beautiful possibility that great love can grow out of sadness if it is well tended. Sadness can make us bitter or wise. We get to choose”

Ch 35 “My expertise in sadness is well earned. But I realized more and more that it is a gift. Living with sadness, accepting it, is easier than trying to pretend it isn’t there. It is another of life’s great mysteries. That sadness and joy can coexist so compatibly with one another. In fact, I wonder if, on this side of heaven, either one can be complete without the other.”

Ch 19 “Yes, we can be such a terrible race at times. But at the same time, terribly wonderful. All capable of saintliness”

Ch17 He tried to stifle it with the argument that in her absence, goodness was no longer possible in the world. But then, the appearance of additional coconspirators — a little boy and girl on bicycles, laughing as they tried to outpace a playful dog — struck him with the inescapable recognition that life would and must go on. Even if all together new and subject to a grief that would be present with every step.

“I knew what she would say. She would say that childhood never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry and sand and paint. But the pocket of history remains. And sooner or later, someone always winds up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there. And then the whole thing comes tumbling down.”

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”

"You're growing up. Maybe that's it," he said softly. "Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror. But that's not the worst. We think everybody is seeing into us…That's not much relief to you because you don't believe it, but it's the best I can do for you. Try to believe that things are neither so good nor so bad as they seem to you now.”

“…You see, there's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be. What are you like?"

He said, “There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.”

Had a hard time staying interested and getting through this one, but glad I stuck with it. I enjoyed the wrap up.

JP, discussing his family that moved a lot — “That was his family. And a tight closed system it was…They were a tiny country of themselves”
23andJP

“I make art because it’s a way of being in this world. Of straddling what’s out there and what’s in here.” She touched her chest. “It makes me look closely at the world and then go deep in for forms and patterns and meaning to get down what I see.”
Sally, Remembering and Repeating

"Maybe both of us have got a piece of him," said Lee. "Maybe thats what immortality is."

“Is it a good feeling to let your life lie fallow?"
"What else could I do?"
"You could try again."

To her, the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don't touch that. Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world.

“Lord, how the day passes! It’s like a life—so quickly when we don’t watch it and so slowly when we do.” Samuel Trask

“When they grow up—won’t I be looking for something in them?”
“Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them” - Adam and Samuel, discussing the twins

On her children and her memoir’s legacy: “I hope they will know, from watching me, that if everything falls apart, they can get up and piece together something new.”

On letting go: “But otherwise, I let go of the rope. It was burning my hands, pulling so forcefully in the opposite direction.”

Ch 20
“How hard to see straight when we felt so much”

Ch 21
“Our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present”

Part Two
“What comfort to be witnesses to each others past”

“I remembered my luck being alive, in simply being”

“Continue on with faith in your own joy and soon enough, a path will emerge” - on the concept of Do

To live in this world
you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day. But until then we get to choose if we will add to that destruction or if we will care for each other”

Chapter 54: “But here is the nature of life: that we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die”

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Peace, when I have found it, has come from accepting that I don't have to solve the riddle of the universe or uncover any magical answers. That life isn't an elaborate calculus problem, and that God isn't waiting to punish us if we make an error. I don't have the answers, but I'm not sure I'm meant to.