Dolors > Recent Status Updates

everything was once something else: nothing goes away

Words are world-makers - and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene

Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace– and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.

We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most

You smiled, and now I no longer know if I dare to exist.

If the stars are the birds of the night sky, then the birds are the stars of the Earth

To think that the world had the nerve to exist without you...

Why should we call ourselves sinners? Life was life, and people acted in a certain way, which sometimes caused one pain.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Wonder was a word thinned from use, but it was what she felt watching the girl feed in that night kitchen with the single bulb burning and all Faha asleep.

You tell her she deserves to be loved in the way you love her, and she starts to cry, quiet as rain.

Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed.

Love is like a tree; it shoots of itself; it sends its deep roots through all our being, and often continues to flourish over a heart in ruins...It is never stronger than when it is most unreasonable.

I bear the dungeon within me; within me is winter, ice, and despair; I have darkness in my soul.

Architecture is dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus will be succeeded by the lead letters of Gutenberg. The book will kill the building. "This will kill that".

Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so.

"The children become the adults. It's too beautiful to bear-and too much to be worthy of."

The premeditation of death is a fore-thinking of liberty. He who hath learned to die, hath unlearned to serve.

“How can I mourn my one loss amid such an abundance of death? My one man, who I have reason to believe did not suffer at his ending.”

“Any woman can get any man, if she's dogged enough and doesn't love him too much.”

Death is inevitable for those who are born; for those who are dead birth is just as certain. Therefore you must not grieve for what is ineluctable.

Writing is a sickness only cured by writing. That's the impossible part.

It's hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You're all the time living in the future.

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

The world he describes, empty of wild creatures and places, overrun instead by people and their agriculture, is a dying world.

There are languages without words and violence is one of them.

It's a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.

Love is both a sacrifice and a balancing act

Conflicted but glad to spend some time with Haruf after a while…

Sometimes the past is so heavy, it's all you can carry.