‘You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don’t hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.’—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people any more. I wanted her in every sense. To want is to lack. That is what it means.—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time. Highlighted
This might sound sadistic but it’s true; people want to see their sadness reflected back at them because it makes them feel connected to something and connection is the best salve for sadness. The irony is we’re usually at our most disconnected when we’re grieving, either because we’ve lost the person we felt closest to or because we’ve withdrawn from others in order to protect ourselves from future pain, or to protect them from our “brokenness.”—Hazel Hayes, Out of Love. Highlighted
A breakup is like a death without a funeral.—Hazel Hayes, Out of Love. Highlighted
How does the love keep swelling in the cavities of our frail bodies, how do these husks hold so much jagged pleasure in their parched split skins?—Ellen Bass, Mules of love. Highlighted
Soon you’ll place bookmarks and go upstairs. I’ve seen your room with its sloping ceiling. Your bed. I won’t imagine more.—Ellen Bass, Mules of love. Highlighted
there are mornings when I wake, my lips swollen from your kisses, my body bruised and fragrant as grasses on which lions have lain, and for a full bereft moment, I cannot, for the life of me, remember why I left.—Ellen Bass, Mules of love. Highlighted
And when he’s dying— even if I go to him—I’ll be little more than a dumb bouquet, spilling my scent.—Ellen Bass, Mules of love. Highlighted
I lean into this stranger, seeking primitive comfort— heat, touch, breath—as we slip into the ancient vulnerability of sleep.—Ellen Bass, Mules of love. Highlighted
If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.—Sally Rooney, Normal People. Highlighted
It’s even more difficult to talk about you in the past tense because you’re technically still here. Here as in alive, obviously, not here in this house.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
And this, I’ve just now decided, is maybe harder than death. With death there’s no option to call someone, to hear them laugh, to see or touch or hold them again. There’s no decision to be made. No temptation to resist. Choosing to be apart is its own special kind of torture. It means making that choice over and over again. Every moment of every day. And some days the choice doesn’t seem as clear.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
But quick as memories come, they are rewritten, altered by the knowledge that you knew then how little time we had. And soon this knowing starts to seep through my whole mind, like ink in water, tainting every memory I have of you, darkening the tone of my whole childhood. I thought that I had mourned you fully. That there would be no more mourning left to do. But this is a fresh, graveside grief, raw and untamed, that doesn’t so much slip under the door as burst through it, demanding my attention.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted