We often confuse what we wish for with what is.
If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?
Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot. For the world called to the heart, which stammered to reply; life, and love, and revelry, and most falsely, hope, called the forgetful, the human heart. Only the soul, obsessed with the journey it had made, and had still to make, pursued its mysterious and dreadful end; and carried heavy with weeping and bitterness the heart along.
Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.
And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.
That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
After you died I could not hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral.
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
My first thought, the year my brother died and my mother took to bed, was that I needed her to be mine again, a mother as I understood it. And when she didn't get up, when she lay there day in and day out, wasting away, I was reminded that I didn't know her, not wholly and completely. I would never know her.
Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
I buried Little Ann by the side of Old Dan. I knew that was where she wanted to be. I also buried part of my life along with my dog.