Gail Caldwell Quotes

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.

It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

Grief is what tells you who you are alone.

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.

I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice.

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part--time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.

The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

Everything about death is a cliché until you're in it.

If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.

Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything.

We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy.

Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages.

Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn't stand to lose.

Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they’re sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you’re poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected.

The other thing I know now, is that we survive grief merely and surely by outlasting it. The ongoing fact of the narrative eclipses the heartbreak within. A deal that seems to be the price we pay for getting to hold on to our beloved dead.

The real trick is to let life, with all it's ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring then it's end.

...gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone.

Give me back what should already be mine. Give me the dark, the freedom of the streets, the right to walk wherever I want, unafraid of rape or assault or just being messed with. The stars belong to me as much as you. Move over. Make room on the bench.

All of this seems as though it were yesterday, or forever ago, in that crevasse between space and time that stays fixed in the imagination. I remember it all because I remember it all. In crisis with someone you love, the dialogue is as burnished as a scar on a tree.

When I wept and told him I was afraid I was too intense, too much, he interrupted my tears and said, "If someone came down from above and told me I could keep only one thing about you, it would be your too-muchness.

It is always hard to leave a home a drama a way of life a life. So I sat there warm and safe that night held by the sea and a good man and my own good fortune victim and witness to all the transitory sweetness like Gatsby's dreams that stood before and behind me.

Pain is what yields the solution.

In crisis, I circled my wagons, more afraid of being disappointed by someone than going it alone.

That sometimes the smartest person in the room is the one who says, "I have no idea.

she made me laugh like I hadn’t laughed in a long time. We were like puppies playing together on the beach. I thought,

On my better days, I could feel free and tough and proud of myself; on the bad ones, I was alone as hell.

The rest of the family tree had a root system soggy with alcohol... One aunt had fallen asleep with her face in the mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner; another's fondness for Coors was so unwavering that I can still remember the musky smell of the beer and the coldness of the cans. Most of the men drank the way all Texas men drank, or so I believed, which meant that they were tough guys who could hold their liquor until they couldn't anymore--a capacity that often led to some cloudy version of doom, be it financial ruin or suicide or the lesser betrayal of simple estrangement. Both social drinkers, my parents had eluded these tragic endings; in the postwar Texas of suburbs and cocktails, their drinking was routine but undramatic.

We found out that day, fairly quickly, how great and complex our fondness was for each other; I also had my first sense of something central about Caroline that would become a pillar of our friendship. When she was confronted with any emotional difficulty, however slight or major, her response as to approach rather than to flee. There she would stay until the matter was resolved, and the emotional aftermath was free of any hangover or recrimination. My instincts toward resolution were similar: I knew that silence and distance were far more pernicious than head-on engagement. This compatibility helped to ensure that there was no unclaimed baggage between us in the years to come.

in all the years i had blundered along in search of my own footing, she had never given me an inkling of this wish. unburdened by the demands of history or anyone else's dreams, i had wandered toward and finally reached a world far outside the plains i loved and loathed. my mother had neither begrudged me this journey nor expected it, certain that i had to make my own way. but she packed my toolbox with her great wit and forbearance before i went, and she stashed there, for long safekeeping, her desire.

This was a hard-won but brilliant education: I had realized, as life is always willing to instruct, that the world as we see it is only the published version. The subterranean realms, whether churches or hospital rooms or smoke-filled basements, are part of what holds up the rest. The realized life versus the external picture of it: the assumption and projections that we all make about other people's lives.

From the first winter afternoon in the Harvard ball fields, "Oh no--I need you" had become an admission and a clarion call--the tenet of dependency that forms the weft of friendship. We needed each other so that we could count the endless days of forests and flat water, but the real need was soldered by the sadder, harder moments--discord or helplessness or fear--that we dared to expose to each other. It took me years to grasp that this grit and discomfort in any relationship are an indicator of closeness, not it's opposite.

Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

I think solitude chose me.

If writers possess a common temperament, it’s that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.

. . .the world as we see it is only the published version. The subterranean realms, whether churches or hospital rooms or smoke-filled basements, are part of what hold up the rest.

Real change, though, is forgiving enough to take a little failure, strong enough to take despair in small doses.

and art instead of God, she often complained that she’d

You got sober. You started work at the Globe. You started therapy. You got Clementine” (my first Samoyed). Here she gave me the side-eye and smiled. “And me, I might add.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. —GEORGE ELIOT, Scenes of Clerical Life

Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived. Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation.

Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder

Mostly I couldn't bear the indisputable lack of her, or the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead. Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.I had a friend who years before had lost her firstborn when he was an infant, and she told me one of the piercing consolations she received in her early grief was from a man who recognized the fierce loyalty one feels to the dead. "The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it." Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

But walls, whether brick or isolation, don't come down without a corresponding amount of labor.

Caldwell is the most expensive date in town," he quoted the other boys as saying. "She'll drink you under the table and she'll never put out.

By then I was thirty years old, and I'd learned that courage in a bottle could get you through all kinds of doors, and all kinds of trouble, and a lot of dead-end nights alone.

No one whose first allegiance is to the source of the problem can hear such warnings, at least not until they've dragged themselves through a few miles of broken glass.

Being in Manhattan was like running headlong toward your own life, or finding out you could fly. To turn away from it would have seemed the failure of a chance not taken.

Don't you know?" he asked gently. "The flaw is the thing we love.

...the light through the windows is always more enchanting when viewed from the street outside.

...I had adored my father and, in the classic Oedipal dance, had tried to find a romantic partner who measured up to him.

So I already knew, given her history with men, that his generosity and caretaking both sustained and confused her.

I think back now to the small measures of trust gained in that first year of the friendship, the ways we went from mutual caution to inseparable ease, and so much of it now seems like a careful, even silent exchange. I knew about Caroline's history with anorexia, and on our long excursions in the woods, I would take two graham crackers out of my pocket and hand her one matter-of-factly, without even looking at her. I must have realized, half consciously, that she would be too polite to refuse; we were both on the thin side, so my offering, to the anorectic mind, was relatively unthreatening. Then I started adding small chunks of chocolate to the stash. The primal and mutual pleasure of this act touches me now, though I couldn't have articulated it, or maybe even recognized it, at the time. After years of struggling with a harsh inner voice of denial and control, Caroline was letting me feed her--reluctantly at first, then with some relief.

Fun was far more difficult to get a handle on than zeal.

Oh God," I groaned, with mock distress. "Now I guess I'll have to get a boyfriend.

I missed Caroline in dozens of ways, but through them all was the absence of the ongoing dialogue, real or imagined.

Walking, reading, watching the light change.

In all the free falls of one's life, there are moments that stand out as a hand reaching across the abyss, and this, for me, was one of them.

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days. The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end.

The heart breaks open.

The old Navajo weavers used to insert an unmatched thread into each of their rugs, a contrasting color that runs to the outside edge. You can spot an authentic rug by this intentional flaw, which is called a spirit line, meant to release the energy trapped inside the rug and pave the way for the next creation. Every story in life worth holding on to has to have a spirit line. You can call this hope or tomorrow or the "and then" of narrative itself, but without it--without that bright, dissonant fact of the unknown, of what we cannot control--consciousness and everything with it would tumble inward and implode. The universe insists that what is fixed is also finite.

Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance does us part--time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.

And yet I sensed that I had not just been pummeled by death but reshaped by it, poised now at some crucial junction between darkness and endurance, which is the realist's version of hope.

Being I loved, I think, is another matter entirely, a neighboring city on the same train route, connected but by no means destiny. If and when the bond takes both ways, you have a third entity, which is the thing the lover and the loved create together. This is called history, or experience, and the strong it is, the more power it has to muck about with the sense of self.

We love what we love in spite of ourselves, toward something larger and more generous than the velvet prison of self.

A version of this, though, is always going on from the moment two people's time and space collide: Subtle or direct, we are negotiating the private and public spheres. If the wounds are on the inside, we have some choice about what to reveal when, and to whom. If the scar is one the outside-the physical signature that announces itself with the nuance of a trumpet-people tend to think they know a great deal about you, whether they do or not.

We attach ourselves to our familiar miseries, an easier act than striking out for the territory. This is a sad truth, though not insurmountable: Despair and fear do not disappear overnight when the conditions that wrought them have changed.

But the point is not to spin the narrative; that defeats the purpose, in some way, of story itself. You can't change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn't make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don't get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

God is love and love is memory, and memory is a bruise or a warmth or a grocery list you cannot bear to throw away.

If we are lucky, we love what we love in part because the object is worth the effort. But sometimes the love itself-the elixir of desire-is enough to bestow the object with the transformative glitter it requires.

The holiness of the Heart's affections," Keith wrote, trusting in nothing but that and the imagination, and I think now that Caroline stilled something in each other, letting us go out and engage in the larger world.

The holiness of the Heart's affections," Keith wrote, trusting in nothing but that and the imagination, and I think now that Caroline and I stilled something in each other, letting us go out and engage in the larger world.

Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder

I was dreamy, stubborn, and selectively fanatical; my idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.

IT’S AN OLD, OLD STORY: I HAD A FRIEND AND WE shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived

An introvert with a Texan’s affability, I was well intentioned but weak on follow-through; not without reason did an old friend refer to me as the gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone.

I was in my early forties, at an age when the view from the hill can be clear and poignant both. The imagined vistas have become realized paths, and I think you may live in the present during those years more than any time since childhood.

This was one of the dynamics between us we came to value: She was the good girl and I was the rebel, and each of us learned enough from the other to expand our respective territories.

Barely on the verge of adolescence, I was still a shy girl who preferred math homework to boys. I was neither daring nor particularly unhappy, but booze flipped a switch in me I hadn’t even known was there.

For years the psychic balm of alcohol—its holy grail certainty that it could take me through anything—eclipsed the hangovers and emerging fear that I was in trouble. I had a silver pocket flask that I filled with whiskey for backup drinks; I figured if I looked the part, then I could get away with the reality.

I’m afraid that if I stop drinking, I’ll be dreary, and anxious all the time, and dull,” I had told him. “Well, you might be,” he had said matter-of-factly. “The only thing you can know for sure is that you’ll be a whole lot less drunk.” After a while, a whole lot less drunk was what I aspired to be.

My mother had asked me once after I was grown what my dad could have done differently, instead of bullying his way through my rebellion. “I wish he’d just told me how much he loved me,” I answered her. “I wish he could have just said, ‘You are precious to me; I won’t let you put yourself in danger.

But she broke down when she started losing her hair. “I know this seems ridiculous,” she said. “But it’s the only thing I can focus on. The rest is too huge.

No one in this place seemed uncomfortable at the emotions of strangers. We had entered a subterranean culture of extremis, where people were dying or trying to live and the heart was laid bare.

THE DETAILS OF dying are sad and grinding: breathing and waiting and breathing and waiting. The body, brilliant machine, knows how and when to close up shop. But Caroline was so strong, and so determined, that even in this final task she moved toward the end with bracing force.

YESTERDAY I FOUND a note I had written to myself, in the piles of outlines and narrative maps that are a writer’s building blocks. “Let Her Die,” I had written at the top of a legal pad, a shorthand reminder to get to that part of the story. Then I saw it the next day and half gasped; for a moment it was as though someone else had given me this instruction. Let her die: a three-word definition of the arc of grief if ever I heard one, and it takes a long time.

It’s your love,” my old friend Pete had said to me years before, when I was trying to leave a lousy relationship. “You get to keep that.

But as much as I complained about my solitude, I also required it. I put a high price on my freedom from obligation, of having to report to no one.