Sorrow And Bliss Meg Mason Quotes

Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It's only the ratios that change. usually on their own.

I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved. I have felt alone but I have never been alone and I've been forgiven for the unforgiveable things I have done.

Nostalgia is the suffering cause by our unappeased earing to return' Whether or not, he said, the home we long for ever existed.

Ideally, Martha, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.

It is hard to look into someone's eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through.

I'm the worst person in the world" "No, you're not." Patrick's hand came down in a fist and he hit the arm of the sofa. "You're not the best person in the world either, which is what you really think. You're the same as everybody else. But that's harder for you, isn't it. You'd rather be one or the other. The idea that you might be ordinary is unbearable.

Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.

Normal people say, I can’t imagine feeling so bad I’d genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn’t that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling a tiredness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.

First novels are autobiography and wish fulfilment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.

things do happen. Terrible things. The only thing any of us get to do is decide whether they happen to us or if, at least in part, they happen for us.

I am not saying you haven't suffered, Martha. But I am saying, grow up. You're not the only one.

Suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gest to choose is the backdrop

We hugged each other like two people who had no practical experience of embracing, had only taught themselves the theory from a poorly worded manual.

And I wonder, is there any way you could come to see that what you’ve been through is for something? Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else?

I am not being whimsical, Martha. Short another, beauty is a reason to live.

No marriage makes sense. Especially not to the outside world. A marriage is its own world.

It used to be a joke between us, that in everything I swing between extremes and he lives his entire life on the middle setting.

Martha,” he said afterwards, lying next to me. “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.” That is what life was, and how it continued for three years after that. The ratios changing on their own, broken, completely fine, a holiday, a leaking pipe, new sheets, happy birthday, a technician between nine and three, a bird flew into the window, I want to die, please, I can’t breathe, I think it’s a lunch thing, I love you, I can’t do this anymore, both of us thinking it would be like that forever.

But the thing about labels is, they’re very useful when they’re right because,’ I carried on through her attempt at interruption, ‘because then you don’t give yourself wrong ones, like difficult or insane, or psychotic or a bad wife.

Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is vastly better than crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.

I was the victim, and victims of course are allowed to behave however they like.

Everything is redeemable, Martha. Even decisions that end up with you unconscious and bleeding in a pedestrian underpass, like me. Although ideally, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.

Martha, why did you label every single box Miscellaneous?

Short of another, beauty is a reason to live.

The great revelation perhaps never did come, instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.' He finishes. Isn't that brilliant girls? It's -

At night I read until I feel asleep and wherever I was, every time somebody in a book wanted something, I wrote down what it was. Once I had finished them all, I had so many torn-off bits of paper, collected in a jar on Ingrid's dressed. But they all said, a person, a family, a home, money, to not be alone. That is all anybody wants.

Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?

All my life I've believed that things happen to me.

There are things, crimes in a marriage, that are so great you can not apologize for them.

Dose a person need to be physically bleeding for you to comprehend they're not well?

Two things that when you put them together in a poem make the reader feel whatever emotion you want them to so you don’t have to expressly name it. As in, if you write slag heap it saves you the job of typing morbid existential despair.

After Barbara’s Contentious Divorce, Everyone Felt Genuinely Hurt, Including Justifiably Kin Left Melancholically Noting Or Perhaps Questioning Rumours Suggesting That, Unannounced, Vincent’d Wed an uXorious Young Zimbabwean.

It is hard to look into someone’s eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through. In some way, found out.

There isn’t a name for the emotion that registered on his face then. It was all of them.

I know you and your sister tease me for the repurposing but all I've been trying to do, all these years, is take rubbish and turn it into something beautiful and much stronger than it was before. I'm sorry if that's a bloody metaphor for everything.

As a child, watching the news or listening to it on the radio with my father I thought, when they said ‘the body was discovered by a man walking his dog’, that it was always the same man. I still imagine him, putting his walking shoes on at the door, finding the leash, the familiar dread as he clips it onto the dog’s collar, but still setting out, regardless, in the hope that, today, there won’t be a body. But twenty minutes later, God, there it is.

I have been loved every day of my adult life. I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved. I have felt alone but I have never been alone and I've been forgiven for the unforgivable things I have done.

What happens next is your choice.

You were done being hopeless.

Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.” Whether or not, he said, the home we long for ever existed.

You decided that because I don't provide a continuous emotional commentary and describe every single feeling I have as it's occurring that I don't feel anything. You told me I was blank. Do you remember? You said I was just the outline of where a husband should be.

I was below the surface for only a second but I thought I was already drowning. I did not think I could swim back but I was only ever feet away from the edge. It was just the pain of the water.

That I’m not good at being a person. I seem to find it more difficult to be alive than other people.

For want of another, beauty is a reason to live.

I know it hasn’t been that long but this is what I have been able to see since then: things do happen. Terrible things. The only thing any of us get to do is decide whether they happen to us or if, at least in part, they happen for us.

There are things, crimes in a marriage, that are so great you cannot apologize for them. Instead, watching television on the sofa, eating the dinner he made while you showered after the hospital, you say, Patrick? Yes. I like this sauce.

I knew she was going to marry him because although he was beside her all night, he did not challenge her on a single point of any anecdote while she was telling it, even though my sister’s anecdotes are always a three-way combination of hyperbole, lies and factual inaccuracy.

Looking back, it is unlikely our mother knew them either – the object of her parties seemed to be filling the house with extraordinary strangers and being extraordinary in front of them, and not a person who used to live above a key-cutter. It was not enough to be extraordinary to the three of us.

as quickly boring, as someone’s explanation of a dream, a revelation had in therapy or a description of what their wedding dress was going to look like.

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop

Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.

I have never understood why people think of champagne as celebratory rather than medicinal. (...) Surely the only time one needs one's blood effervesced is when life is utterly flat.

Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.” That is what life was, and how it

Normal people say, I can't imagine feeling so bad I'd genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn't that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling tiredness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.

I have been loved every day of my adult life. I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved. I have felt alone but I have never been alone and I’ve been forgiven for the unforgiveable things I have done.

Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It's only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that's it, it's going to be like this forever, they change again.

Everything hurt. The soles of my feet, my chest, my heart, my lungs, my scalp, my knuckles, my cheekbones. it hurt to talk, to breathe, to cry, to eat, to read, to hear music, to be in a room with other people, and to be by myself.

Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else? Is it why you are the love of your sister’s life? Why you’ll be a writer of much more, one day, than a small supermarket column? How you can be my fiercest bloody critic, and someone with so much compassion she’ll buy glasses she doesn’t need because the man fell off his stool. Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire? And you have been loved for all your adult life by one man. That is a gift not many people get, and his stubborn, persistent love isn’t in spite of you and your pain. It is because of who you are, which is, in part, a product of your pain. You do not have to believe me about that but I know—I do know, Martha—that your pain has made you brave enough to carry on. If you want to, you can put all of this right. Start with your sister.

I’m the worst person in the world.’ ‘No you’re not.’ His hand came down in a fist and he hit the arm of the sofa. ‘You’re not the best person in the world either, which is what you really think. You’re the same as everybody else. But that’s harder for you, isn’t it. You’d rather be one or the other. The idea you might be ordinary is unbearable.

You are standing still and then you're falling down a flight of stairs, but you don't know who pushed you. There is no one behind you.

I went to bed, even though there were hours of daylight left because I felt so ashamed, I couldn't bear to be awake.

One day, years later, my mother would tell me that no marriage makes sense to the outside world because, she would say, a marriage is its own world.

My perception of Winsome belonged to my mother—I thought of her as old, punctilious, someone without an interior life or worthwhile passions. That was the first time I saw her for myself. Winsome was an adult, someone who took care, who loved order and beauty and labored to create it as a gift to other people. She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and smiled. She was still wearing her wet apron.

After that, Nicholas got up, stretched, and told me I could have his spot because he just remembered a girl he need to make amends with because his final act before rehab was putting a nine iron through her windscreen after taking more than his recommended daily intake of methamphetamine. 'Which I discover is non. Back shortly.

I’m glad.” I said, “That she’s not going to give up ham?” “That you’re unpleasantly superior.” He meant, since it is why you are still alive. Probably, it is not the worst thing I have ever thought. But is in the top one hundred.

He had an extravagant energy that animated him and anesthetized whoever he was talking to and was in on the joke of how beautiful he was. When I told him he had the brilliant eyes of a Victorian child who would die the same night of scarlet fever, he laughed excessively.

In the beginning, I told strangers I couldn't have children because I thought it would stop them from continuing beyond their initial inquiry. It is better to say you don't wnat them. Then they know straightaway that there is something wrong with you, just not in a medical sense.

That was the root of the giant misunderstanding that was us getting married: the fact that he thought I was so uninhibited, fun, a skinny person interested in fashion, an attender of magazine parties, and I thought he had a sense of humor and didn’t take immense amounts of cocaine.

I snatched up the papers and reminded him that it had been his idea. “But yes, thank God you didn’t manage to get me pregnant, Jonathan. A baby I didn’t want in the first place turning out to have a genetic predilection for cocaine and white jeans.” I left before he could say anything else.

Patrick crouched beside my chair, holding the armrest, and moved my hair. He asked me if I felt like I should go in, just for a bit. He said it was up to me. I said no thank you. I had always been too afraid to be among those people in case they didn’t think it was weird I was there. In case the doctors wouldn’t let me go. I wanted Patrick to grab me by the wrists and drag me there so that I did not have to decide. I wanted him not to believe me when I said it was fine.

It is hard to look into someone’s eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through. In some way, found out. But, for as long as the kiss had lasted, I didn’t feel guilty for being so happy, when I had just taken something away from Patrick so that I could have what I wanted.

At home, at parties, our mother’s drinking had always been a source of amusement to us. It was becoming less so now that we were older, and she was older, and her drinking was no longer dependent on there being interesting people in the house or any people at all. And it had never been amusing at Belgravia, where my uncle and aunt drank in a way that did not produce a change in mood, and Ingrid and I learned that bottles could be recorked and put away and glasses left on the table unfinished.

I was wearing the only outfit I would own once I left – jeans and a Primark sweatshirt that Ingrid bought two of because they were £9 and had the word University printed on the front, which, she said, made it clear to people that we’d been educated at tertiary level but weren’t so desperate for approval we needed them to know where.

Insanity is not a dealbreaker if it's you.

It's like going into the cinema when it's light and when you come out you're shocked because you didn't expect it to be dark, but it is.

My mother was beginning to describe herself as a conscientious objector where domestic matters were concerned.

That scene and every other seemed to vibrate with brilliance and humor as I typed them. The next day they read like the work of a fifteen-year-old with encouraging parents

Is this your fist time with lying, Patrick? You're not very good at it. Seriously, why didn't you go with Oliver?

They could not tell that for most of my adult life and all of my marriage I have been trying to become the opposite of myself.

Insanity' he said 'is not a deal-breaker. If it's you.

It is too much work to explain to them that you can stop and start again from nothing, that you can love the same person twice

Martha, no marriage makes sense. Especially not to the outside world. A marriage is its own world.

Then it was over and we stood up and said goodbye again. It was something else, the whole world was in it.

I slid Ingrid’s journal out of the bag and wrote the caption out on the first page, then glanced quickly over my shoulder in case I had been seen. But I was the only person who would judge a woman who was sitting by herself in a shopping centre bakery on a weekday morning, when her running clothes and her gratitude journal testified to an effort to improve herself on two fronts.

When people discover that you and your husband were separated for a time but have since reconciled, they put their head on the side and say, “Clearly you never stopped loving him deep down.” But I did. I know I did. It is easier to say yes, you’re so right, because it is too much work to explain to them that you can stop and start again from nothing, that you can love the same person twice.

As a child, watching the news or listening to it on the radio with my father I thought, when they said “the body was discovered by a man walking his dog,” that it was always the same man. I still imagine him, putting his walking shoes on at the door, finding the leash, the familiar dread as he clips it onto the dog’s collar, but still setting out, regardless, in the hope that, today, there won’t be a body. But twenty minutes later, God, there it is.

There was a café, a minute or two from the Executive Home, that I used to go to every morning. The barista was very young and looked like a non-specific famous person. One day I made a joke about it as he pressed the lid onto my coffee. He said something disappointingly flirtatious in response and by the end of the week I had entered into a mandatory banter relationship with him. It quickly became onerous and I started going to a café that was farther away, where the coffee was less good and where I did not have to talk.

I said I just wanted to not exist anymore and asked if there was something he could give me that would make me go away, but in a way that wouldn’t hurt anyone or make a mess. Then I stopped talking because he said I seemed more intelligent than that, sounding frustrated.

Ingrid said yes you can. “Even the women who get those things lose them again. Husbands die and children grow up and marry someone you hate and use the law degree you bought them to start an Etsy business. Everything goes away eventually, and women are always the last ones standing so we just make up something else to want. I don't want it to be an invented thing. Everything is invented. Life is invented. Everything you see anyone doing is something they made up. I invented Swindon for fuck's sake, and made myself want it and now I do.

Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.” That is what life was, and how it continued for three years after that. The ratios changing on their own, broken, completely fine, a holiday, a leaking pipe, new sheets, happy birthday, a technician between nine and three, a bird flew into the window, I want to die, please, I can’t breathe, I think it’s a lunch thing, I love you, I can’t do this anymore, both of us thinking it would be like that forever.

What was the point? It was bloody long.” “Oliver, shut up. I don’t know.” She flicked her hair. “Just that feeling of like, thank God when you see that person. Martha, do you know what I’m talking about?” I said yes. Thank God is how I felt when I saw Patrick that day. Not a thrill or affection or pleasure. Visceral relief.

And you could do it. I promise. It’s not even that hard. I mean look at me.’ She directed my attention to her unclean clothes, her swollen chest, damp spots on the cushions and looked about to laugh, then like she was going to cry, then merely exhausted. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. Ingrid said, ‘When is it?’ I told her it was tomorrow. ‘In that case, a bag of salty liquorice. The kind from Ikea.’ The baby squirmed and pulled off. Ingrid let out a little cry and covered her breast. I helped her turn the cushion around and once he was on again, I asked if I could get her a kind of liquorice that didn’t require a journey to Croydon. She did cry then, telling me through tears that if I understood what it was like, being woken up fifty times a night and having to feed a baby every two hours when it takes an hour and fifty-nine minutes and feels like being stabbed in the nipple with four hundred knives, then I would be like, do you know what? I think I will just get my sister the liquorice she specifically likes.

few months ago, Ingrid called and told me about a kind of fade cream she had started using to get rid of a brown spot that had appeared on her face. On the back of the tube it said that it was suitable for most problem areas. I asked her if she thought it would work on my personality. She said maybe. “But it’s not going to make it go away completely.

I chose one that was inexplicably thick, with twice as many pages as its shelf mates, because it said, on the cover, You Should Just Go For It. It was meant to sound carefree and motivating but for want of an exclamation mark, it came across as weary and resigned. You Should Just Go For It. Everyone Is Sick Of Hearing You Talk About It. Follow Your Dreams. The Stakes Could Not Be Lower.

When people discover that you and your husband were separated for a time but have since reconciled, they put their head on the side and say, ‘Clearly you never stopped loving him deep down.’ But I did. I know I did. It is easier to say yes, you’re so right, because it is too much work to explain to them that you can stop and start again from nothing, that you can love the same person twice.

I wanted to say it was the first time I had been able to decide how to react to something bad, even such a small thing, instead of coming to consciousness in the middle of already reacting. I said I hadn't known you could choose how to feel instead of being overpowered by an emotion from outside yourself. I said I couldn’t explain it properly. I didn’t feel like a different person, I felt like myself. As though I had been found.

When you are a woman over thirty, with a husband but without children, married couples at parties are interested to know why. They agree with each other that having children is the best thing they have ever done. According to the husband, you should just get on with it; the wife says you don’t want to leave it too late. Privately, they are wondering if there is something medically wrong with you. They wish they could ask directly.

I stayed there and read so many spines, then one by one I started taking books off, building a pile in my left arm. My selection criteria was threefold. Books by women or suitably sensitive/depressive men who had made up their own lives. Any book I lied about reading, except Proust because even with everything I had done I did not deserve to suffer that much. Books with promising titles, that I could reach without having to stand on a chair. They were old. The covers made my fingers feel chalky, and the pages smelled like the bedroom of waiting for my father to finish in a secondhand shop when I was young. But they would tell me how to be or what to want and they would save me from a gratitude journal and it was the only thing I could think of.

At the reception, Jessamine told me and Nicholas and Oliver a story about the first time she went into town at night, as a teenager. Winsome was supposed to pick her up at nine but she wasn’t there. By nine-thirty all Jessamine’s friends had gone home and she was alone in a crowd at Leicester Square, embarrassed, then angry, then afraid because the only reason Winsome would be late was if she was dead. Oliver said, “Yeah, even then she would have made it.” Jessamine said exactly. “But then, at like ten, I saw her shoving through a group of drunk people, I honestly felt like I was going to vomit and cry, I was so relieved. It’s like, one second you can be alone and terrified in a crowd of scary idiots and the next you know you’re completely safe.