More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful.
When one has been disappointed for so long, hope becomes the enemy. One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope.
There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything has ended and nothing else can ever begin.
When we are children, we believe that our elders know all and that even when we cannot understand the world, they can make sense of it. Even after we are grown, in moments of fear or sorrow, we still turn instinctively to the older generation, hoping to finally learn some great hidden lesson about death and pain. Only to learn instead that the only lesson is that life goes on.
That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship is, for the other person, something finished and done with.
Do not agonize about yesterday. Do not borrow tomorrow’s trouble. Let my heart hunt. Rest in the now.
‘I will always take your part, Bee. Right or wrong. That is why you must always take care to be right, lest you make your father a fool.’
It was better to leave the space empty of words than to choose the wrong ones.
