The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

And there it is: The beautiful, vibrant, living world goes on.

Some things are meant to return to us again and again.

“You’re holding on so tight,” that therapist told me. “You think you will be obliterated if anything bad ever happens.” Now, lying in my bed, obliteration feels like peace, like drifting toward sleep. This is the terrible thing.

how can we possibly get rid of the thought of death; how can it not seem at every moment to be gripping us by the throat?

“I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about it or—still less—my unfinished garden.”

A mastectomy of bullshit,

I love goddammit motherfucker, and I really love Well, that could have been worse.

“And I get to hang out mostly in my own world—and that’s where I make the most sense.”

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”

Circles: “The universe is fluid and volatile.” I’ve been rereading. “Permanence is but a word of degrees.”

Thoughts and prayers are great, but Ativan and pot are better.

“I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.”

“Whatever you get here shall smack of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging.”