Top 34 Gail Caldwell Quotes
#2. My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.
Gail Caldwell
#3. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#4. The territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace.
Gail Caldwell
#5. We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy.
Gail Caldwell
#6. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#7. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#8. Memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain.
Gail Caldwell
#9. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#10. I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
Gail Caldwell
#11. The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.
Gail Caldwell
#12. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#13. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#14. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#15. It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.
Gail Caldwell
#16. Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.
Gail Caldwell
#17. Gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone.
Gail Caldwell
#18. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#19. That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.
Gail Caldwell
#20. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#21. That sometimes the smartest person in the room is the one who says, "I have no idea.
Gail Caldwell
#22. Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.
Gail Caldwell
#23. What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.
Gail Caldwell
#24. The mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her.
Gail Caldwell
#25. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#26. The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.
Gail Caldwell
#27. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#28. Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear ...
Gail Caldwell
#31. Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.
Gail Caldwell
#32. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#33. 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.
Gail Caldwell
#34. I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice.
Gail Caldwell
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
