The Correspondent Virginia Evans Quotes

I didn't know it was happiness at the time, because it felt like busyness and exhaustion and financial stress and self doubt.

Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed.

I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about.

Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal.

I know you think of me as your mother only, but please remember, inside I am also just a girl.

knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid,

Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.” This feels like the truest thing I have ever read. I guess there’s no bottom to a person, but I feel you have left fewer stones unturned than anyone else who’s ever passed through, and it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that, Theodore.

I know you know this, but I want to repeat that when someone(s) treats you poorly, it is a reflection of him or herself and the misery within the heart of them. It doesn’t help a bit to hear that when you’re young, but later it will.

The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it?

we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.

How cruel life is only this long. Now that I see clearly, I’d like more time.

when someone(s) treats you poorly, it is a reflection of him or herself and the misery within the heart of them.

We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die.

You get the one life. It’s awfully unfair, isn’t it?

I wonder, was I always lonely? I’m not sure I’ve ever felt at home in the world, but I’m not sure that’s unique.

with age I have learned my feelings and my experience are, sadly, not unique. Terrible things happen. We make choices. Time cannot be rewound. The good that comes out of the bad can be unbearable.

Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?

You are a wonderful, interesting woman, full of love and kindness, but you are so damn stubborn and determined you know exactly what is right in every situation.

But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace…. Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. Joan Didion, “On the Morning After the Sixties,” The White Album

Gilbert has never left me, and the circumstances of his death have never for one day diminished, and as I age it feels so strange that the majority of people with whom I come in contact don’t have the slightest inkling that he ever lived. I had him for so much less time than I’ve lived without him, and yet his presence is enormous, though I keep it to myself.

I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about. I wish someone would have thought to say to me, earlier on, 'Sybil, over and over again serpents will emerge from the bottom of the sea and grab you by the feet.' Of course I didn't say anything of the sort to my own children, and I probably never would.

we always trying to get back to the happier times? I think that is what it feels like, with Gill. I’ve spent my life trying to get back to having him even though I know I cannot.

am an old woman and my life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane.

I had a bad feeling in my bowels and I realized it’s because after a quarter-century drought, at the age of seventy-seven, I find myself courted by two men at the same time!

It was agonizing because it felt so true to the experiences of my own life

Someone I loved very much said once to me there is no parallel universe; there is no ‘what could have been if only.’ How I wish there was.

It appears the matter is not one of policy, but of your caprice.

And yes, I will go into the year as you said: boldly, unapologetically, head up and not taking bullshit from anyone with a penis. You seem a worthy person to offer such advice.

Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives;

what is left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations, and your life, the life you see from the inside, right now, as monumental, will be reduced to the blood in their veins and perhaps, if you are lucky, a distant namesake,

I guess I was considered somewhat odd. I wasn’t a cheerful, frivolous little girl interested in dolls and drawing. I was serious and rather grave. Watchful, wary. I was a skeptic. I didn’t have many friends. I read a great deal. I was reading all the time.

I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside. Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years.

I supposed there is this one part of it, which is, Gilbert has never left me, and the circumstances of his death have never for one day diminished, and as I age it feels so strange that the majority of people with whom I come in contact don't have the slightest inkling that he ever lived.

I guess there’s no bottom to a person, but I feel you have left fewer stones unturned than anyone else who’s ever passed through, and it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that, Theodore.

Perhaps if you have children, they will remember you; if you have grandchildren, they, God allowing, may also retain a few fragments of memory including you, but their children will not. They may keep some old photos in a book on a shelf, and perhaps two or three times in a lifetime may turn the page and find your face

There is an articulation of life one hears again and again. People will say, ‘oh, this is only a season.’ You know what I am referring to, don’t you? I mean how if someone is in difficulty they’ll say ‘it’s only a season.’ Or if someone is having a new baby and in the sleepless nights, an older woman will comfort with this idea that the expanse of time is a season—a winter, I suppose? (rather, a hurricane season!)—and the season will change eventually to something sunnier. I take issue with this. There are, by definition, four seasons that repeat in measured pattern year after year. As there is no such rhythm in the human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one

You are right about what you said—we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic. I miss you. Back in late April, and Theodore will accompany me for a visit. You’re the only person left who writes, and I’m grateful.

The first letter I ever wrote was in 1948 to P. L. Travers regarding her book Mary Poppins. I loved this book and read it numerous times. I loved that Mary Poppins conducted her own life, and the lives of the children Jane and Michael, in such a controlled, even military, manner. This appealed to me terribly, that level of strict control—it seemed very safe. But also, somehow, there was such a great deal of creativity, adventure, color, surprise! And there was something about—Mary Poppins wasn’t their mother, and you knew (even as a child) she couldn’t rightly stay there forever, but as a child I imagined this lovely secret, that Mary Poppins was my real mother and that one day she would float down into my yard on the handle of an umbrella and declare I was her daughter, and she would explain the whole reason for having farmed me out, and then she would settle, and take me back and mind me with that perfect combination of wonder and predictability, though I knew obviously the book was a work of fiction and she would not, and also, didn’t I know, Colt, that as much as I wanted this, I also didn’t want it. I knew the moment she settled in to become

cannot quite manage to move past the fact that you, my best friend, the person I held dearest to myself, would betray me by hosting my own daughter, who, as you very well know, I see once a year if I am lucky, and keep it from me. How humiliating, that you and she should see fit to need to conduct clandestine meetings. How wonderful it must be for you to have such a strong bond with Fiona, such an intimate, confiding relationship. I cannot imagine such a pleasure, but it sounds WONDERFUL. I just relish the thought of her cozying up in your den telling you all the ways in which I have failed her as a

Real hell for this woman. I can still picture her. Elizabeth Franklin was her name, teensy little thing sitting up on the stand and holding up her handbag, which had been chewed by rats at night.

simpler value of the written letter, which is, namely, that reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world,

I am finding I have nowhere to put all of this. I’m sorry, but do you know what I mean? It’s like I’ve come home from the grocery store overburdened with bags, but the cupboards, the refrigerator, the pantry, the countertop are all already full. A mother and father? But I had a mother and father. Siblings? I have a sibling. It feels a betrayal to even acknowledge you exist! No vacancy. No room at the inn. We’re all full up, and yet the thing I always thought was so small now seems as enormous as a galaxy, this thing I have felt my whole life, and that is, a sense of something missing, this curiosity of why my mother let me go. I haven’t the tools for it

I’ve spent my life trying to get back to having him even though I know I cannot.

perhaps you are asking how the grief wears over time partly from a place of kindness and partly, on the other hand, from a place of self-preservation, and understandably so, wondering what you should expect in your own situation of hell.

Did I ever tell you that when I was about nine years old my parents gave me a short letter that had been written by my birth mother when she handed me off?

I had one of those stopovers when the children were young, just before Gilbert died, and Daan and I were happy, even though I didn’t know it was happiness at the time because it felt like busyness and exhaustion

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro?

he was finding confidence behind the veil of ink on the page, as many people do. He

we are thirty in our hearts,

all this time, of course, but the fact is that I got every moment of you there was.

are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die.

I could write to anyone. I could take the time to think through what I wanted to say

who I was doing my best to be. But I have to tell you something There were times I hated you, but it was always I I have hated myself, and that was what it was You loved me

As there is no such rhythm in the human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round. We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die.

Grief (the biggest grief in the world) is like - What? What is it that happens to a person? I’ve always felt it is like a scream living inside of me

In any case, I wish I could say after all this time it's easier, but it's not easier

Grief (the biggest grief in the world) is like - What? What is it that happens to a person? I’ve always felt it is like a scream living inside of me I walk around the house or dig in the garden, or wander the grocery store, or sit at my desk and there’s a screaming inside my head. Like an air horn that warns of war

I've spent my life trying to get back to having him even though I know I cannot.

I have found it to be absolutely as-tounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about. I wish someone would have thought to say to me, earlier on, 'Sybil, over and over again serpents will emerge from the bottom of the sea and grab you by the feet.' Of course I didn't say anything of the sort to my own children, and I probably never would.

That amazement one feels at this stage of life—a sort of astonishment that is also confusion, which leads to a sort of worry, or a sort of fear,

Did I? And laid him on his side on the dock. There were two moles on his back and I must have stared at them because I see his tan, wet back, the two moles. Did I scream for help? Who got him out of the lake? Was it me? In my memory, it’s all silence. It has been a long time since I returned to that. It’s been years. It’s possible it’s been decades. What do you remember? Suddenly I am hungry for these memories. Write me and tell me what you remember.

Dear Dr. Jameson, It’s in the last week or so I am suddenly finding it much more difficult to see.

If all of this amounts to you as nothing more than drivel, then you might also consider a simpler value of the written letter, which is, namely, that reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see. The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law. It's all the same.

If all of this amounts to you as nothing more than drivel, then you might also consider a simpler value of the written letter, which is, namely, that reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see. The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law. It's all the same.

Honestly, it was like my mother was the makeup of his skeletal system, she died and the bones POOF disappeared, and the rest of him, the meat, the organs, the skin, slopped to a pile. He was this way for about a year until he remarried (new bones, new skeleton).

I despise the notion of Texas with every atom in my being, a hot, barren wasteland of tumbleweed and people carrying guns and wearing cowboy boots,

What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace,” and then it goes on, and then, “Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.

The stretches on the high, windblown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort, and aren’t we always trying to get back to the happier times?

take great care with my selections now, knowing my years of reading are coming to an end.

Golf, drinking, staying in one’s pajamas until late in the morning, stretching oneself to find ways in which to pass the days is the way we were meant to spend our vacation weeks, not decades of our lives.

I know you think of me as your mother only

If you do find anything, Harry, please refrain from sending me an e-mail with long strings of characters in blue I’m meant to click.

Not nostalgia

Of course you are bored. The mind was not created for idleness. Golf

I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words

it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold

he was well liked because he only ever said the things people wanted to hear. He taught me that

But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch

are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious

I would be simply asleep

What I have made for myself is personal

I'm not sure I've ever felt at home in the world, but I'm not sure that's unique

Imagine

We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious

was quiet and watchful. I remember always finding it odd the way people had of speaking around and around a thing rather than directly to the thing