Berry Pickers Quotes

I found it strange that no word exists for a parent who loses a child. If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he’s a widower. But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.

When you’re an only child, semi-imprisoned, books become more than paper between hard cardboard, more than the alphabet organized into words and printed on a page.

Anger is exhausting. Holding on to it will drain the life out of you.

Hope is such a wonderful thing until it isn’t.

It’s funny what you remember when something goes wrong.

Time quickens the older you get, as if the universe is trying to push you toward the finish line, to make room for the younger, the stronger, to mark your brief place in history and move on.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Us I am Four billion years of mutations Hurling through space on a rock that grew green And beauty. Berry-picker, mammoth-hunter, storyteller, Begetter of souls. Cognition. And I imagine. I believe. I surrender. We love. And I believe Bravely. Shared myths, illusions weeping, a world Connected by chafe and Poetry. Life-giving secrets in Immortal words in a la la land Cresting. I am A wave Breathing. Would die for you. I believe. I am.

Alice once said that anger and sadness are just two different sides of the same coin.

Every one of us alive today comes from something bad done to the family that came before us. You being alive is a goddamn miracle, so no more talk about sour blood. Own your mistakes, make amends and move on. We owe that to those who didn’t make it.

Own your mistakes, make amends and move on.

The need for conformity and for the attention of others can lead to a life of misery.

Let those tears flow. Alice always said that holding in tears is like holding in pee—it’s gonna hurt eventually, so you might as well let them go as soon as you feel them.

I don’t have time for regret, or the emotional strength it requires. I see the world unfolding as it is meant to. Sometimes I have trouble finding meaning in the things that happen to me, but I assume that the universe knows what it’s doing.

THE DASH SADDENS ME. THE SIMPLICITY MISSES SO much. It doesn’t allow for all the downs that bring a person low or the joys that lift them up. All the bends and turns that make up a lifetime are flattened and erased. The dash on a tombstone is wholly inadequate. Everything around it is more remarkable. The name, etched in cursive or dignified fonts. Sometimes a photo is carved into the grey granite, giving life to the dead. Yet the dash, that line that carries the entire sum of a life within it, is unremarkable.

A scent can bypass logic, can circumvent time.

Until the day I die, and that isn’t too far away anymore, I will remember the sound of all those voices yelling Ruthie’s name.

I've found that money rarely helps with the things that are most important.

Fate is a trickster. He likes to set up all the clues just to see if you can put them together and make sense of the things you never thought to make sense of in the first place.

Words are powerful and funny things, said or unsaid.

Somewhere in the echo of time, the universe had decided that happiness of a certain kind was not to be mine. I would have to find joy elsewhere.

let the living speak. They have longer to atone for it.

There was love in that house, but none of us really knew what to do with it.

Secrets and lies can take on a life of their own, they can be twisted and manipulated, or they can burst into the world from the mouth of someone just as they are starting to lose their mind.

That’s why I found it strange that no word exists for a parent who loses a child. If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he’s a widower. But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.

Even people who exude light and happiness have dark secrets. Sometimes, the lie becomes so entrenched it becomes the truth, hidden away in the deep recesses of the mind until death erases it, leaving the world a little different. Secrets and lies can take on a life of their own, they can be twisted and manipulated, or they can burst into the world from the mouth of someone just as they are starting to lose their mind.

Jacob remained by Mollie’s side throughout the night, clinging to her hand as well as to her vow. She wasn’t going to leave him. She’d given her word, and Mollie never broke a promise. He prayed. He tended the cuts she’d suffered from the blackberry brambles when she’d fallen. The vines had grown entangled within a cedar’s branches, and as best he could tell, she’d climbed the tree in order to reach the ripe berries that other pickers had left behind. Unfortunately, the limb she’d shimmied out on had been weak and had broken beneath her weight. “You know, this tree climbing and dropping through busted church floors is going to have to stop after we’re married. My heart won’t be able to take the stress.” He smiled and ran the back of his finger down the smooth line of her cheek. “Not that I expect any dictate I give you to have much effect. My only hope is that you’ll grow to care enough about me that you’ll take pity on me and cease taking unnecessary risks with your life.

Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second Language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a lefty nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day.

ON THE PRAIRIES, it’s said that you can watch your dog run away for ten days.

Some wounds cannot be healed. Some wounds never close, never scar. But the further away from the injury, the easier it became to smile.

People will be someone other than themselves if they have people who rely on them.

You never know when you might need kindness from people.

Time quickens the older you get, as if the universe is trying to push you forward toward the finish line, to make room for the younger, tye stronger, to mark your brief place in history and move on.

I could always find comfort in my own company. Alice told me this is a strength many people don't have. The need for conformity and for the attention of others can lead to a life of misery. I knew that half the people I taught with were simply going through the motions instead of actually living. So, I allowed the to judge me, and I judged them in return.

But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.

Light is more vibrant in the cold, like it knows that people are stuffed away in their houses, miserable from lack of sunshine, and it needs to put on a show.

That’s why I found it strange that no word exists for a parent who loses a child.

snowballs I’d just dropped, its roundness hard and solid, before

MARRIAGE IS A FUNNY THING. THERE ARE SO MANY people in the world, and you decide to commit the rest of your life, the rest of your emotional energy, to just one. You assume that the mysterious connection that ties you to one another will hold. A connection that can’t be trusted, one that probably manifests in that same mystical space where stories come from. A place that allows you to suspend your disbelief. Marriage assumes that

Some people, I have learned, are meant to read great works and others are meant to write them. Often, these are not the same people.

People will be someone other than themselves if they have people who rely on them,

I wouldn't say I replaced Ruthie, but when she went missing, I became the youngest child. A responsibility comes with that, being the youngest, the baby. I never did live up to the responsibility.

You never know what your last words to someone are going to be, and it's hard to reconcile it when the deed is done and the person is gone. For years I tried to think of something else I might have said to Charlie, something that would've let him know how much I looked up to him, how much I loved him. Words I don't think he ever heard from me. But I've lived so many years with the memory that the last words my brother heard were not words of love or encouragement, but words of anger, stained by my own embarrassment. The last thing I said to Ruthie didn't even have the dignity of being a word. A finger pushing into my lips, a shush to keep my secret. Words are powerful and funny things, said or unsaid.

I could never imagine my life like that, leaving work at the end of each day smelling of stale coffee and cigarette smoke. Married at twenty, settled. It seemed to me to be a continuation of the life I was already leading. I wasn't sure what I wanted, but I knew it wasn't that.

Some people, I learned, are meant to read great works and others are meant to write them. Often, these are not the same people. When I was young, I decided that I could be the next great American writer. But over the years, no matter how hard I tried, I was denied access to that mythical space where stories dwell, waiting for the right person to find them and give them form. Somewhere between thought and ink, the stories held in my imagination dissolved into the ether.

I think that we all do bad things, but that don’t always make us bad people.” She

There are things more important in this world than taking credit,

My first taste of freedom was delicious. I was destined for more freedom, but not until years later did I understand how that freedom came to me.

Over the decades, the walls of this house have been torn down and built again in different places and painted in different colours, but a closet still holds a very old pair of girl’s boots with the head of a doll sticking out of one of them on the top shelf, between old woven baskets and Christmas decorations.

There is a code among the dying: let the living speak. They have longer to atone for it.

I could always find comfort in my own company. Alice told me this is a strength many people don't have. The need for conformity and for the attention of others can lead to a life of misery. I knew that half the people I taught with were simply going through the motions instead of actually living. So, I allowed them to judge me, and I judged them in return.

wasn’t loud, but the sound was amplified by my knowing I was doing something I shouldn’t. I looked down into the drawer. Empty. There was nothing in it except for a few paper clips and dust. All those photos were gone. I sat staring into the empty drawer, then closed it quietly when I heard her heels on the floor above me. I was halfway up the stairs before I remembered what I had gone down for. I found a large piece of ash and tossed it into the furnace.

That’s why I found it strange that no word exists for a parent who loses a child. If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he is a widower. But there is no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.

If heaven doesn’t exist, I guess I’ll never know, so I’m not going to let it bother me. I’d tell Mom that I doubt heaven, but she believes that all the people she loves, who’ve passed on, are sitting at the right hand of the Lord.

You like to find fault with everyone but your own self.

Time quickens the older you get, as if the universe is trying to push you toward the finish line, to make room for the younger, the stronger, to mark your brief place in history and move on.

I don’t cry anymore for my parents. I miss them, yes, but I think that as the ones we love get older, we just start to separate from them, like oil from water, a line separating the living and the dying, the living carelessly gathering at the top.

Prejudice runs deep and offers no apologies in small towns.

A peace comes after the chaos of change. There’s a strange acceptance and quiet acknowledgement that the change has happened and now it’s time to navigate that odd time in between, before the final goodbye.

Time quickens the older you get, as if the universe is trying to push you toward the finish line, to make room for the younger, the stronger, to mark your brief place in history and move on. Our tenth Christmas without Father came in the blink of an eye.

All things take time. Grief can be wide and feel bottomless sometimes, but eventually, it begins to subside, to grow into something useful.

Did I get lonely? Of course, but those bouts of loneliness passed quickly, and I could always find comfort in my own company. Alice told me this is a strength that many people don’t have. The need for conformity and for the attention of others can lead to a life of misery.

All this knowledge would have helped me so much more when I was young and a fool. It’s a tragedy that we only come to these understandings when we’re too old for them to be useful.

Desiree and I became friends. We bonded over our shared love of quiet and solitude. We spent time together without a lot of chit-chat and noise. I never asked what led her to appreciate the quiet and she never asked me; it just worked for us. We were quiet without being alone.

In Mark’s presence I became a Norma who laughed in public, who talked to strangers in the grocery line, who danced at the bar after a few drinks. I still yearned for the quiet of the library or the stillness of a Tuesday afternoon in the dorm when everyone was either in class or studying. I still called Desiree, and we went to coffee shops and studied together. At times, I still feared being around other people, but Mark understood and gently forced me out of my shell. I loved the way he would take my hand and lead me into a group of people at a party. My face would flush, but his hand resting on my lower back calmed me enough to be social and not that peculiar version of myself, so like my mother.

promise complete happiness or fully rid herself of the anger, no matter how many times a week she put on those shoes and walked to the big stone church in town, but she would harness the sadness. She

Maybe you have bad luck, but there is nothing sour in us. We’ve been through shit, remember. Every one of us alive today comes from something bad done to the family that came before us. You being alive is a goddamn miracle, so no more talk about sour blood. Own your mistakes, make amends and move on. We owe that to those who didn’t make it.

And the dead don’t mind when we remember them and pass on their stories.

Five decades of sitting on a shelf in a place far removed from Maine had not diminished the scent of campfire and summer evenings. Maybe the doll only smelled of dust, but in that moment, it brought me back to a place where I belonged.

I hate that this is the way you are going to remember me. I hate it that you and my Leah will only ever know the sick Joe, the dying Joe.” He took a deep breath. “I wasn’t an angel—don’t let them tell you that after I’m gone. I ruined myself all by myself, but I just wish we could have known each other when I wasn’t like this. Before I got mad at the world.

It’s something I had a hard time reconciling, my father making himself small for them. “People will be someone other than themselves if they have people who rely on them,

Over the decades, the walls of this house have been torn down and built again in different places and painted in different colours, but a closet still holds a very old pair of girl’s boots with the head of a doll sticking out of one of them on the top shelf,

Don’t, Mae. You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child. And I pray you don’t ever find out. Her boots are staying there until I say they aren’t.” Over the decades, the walls of this house have been torn down and built again in different places and painted in different colours, but a closet still holds a very old pair of girl’s boots with the head of a doll sticking out of one of them on the top shelf,

There are things more important in this world than taking credit, Joe.

Their memory haunted my mother, and she carried them around with her, constantly tripping over their absence and blaming me for the fall.