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WHAT LIES BEHIND US AND WHAT LIES BEFORE US ARE TINY MATTERS COMPARED TO WHAT LIES WITHIN US. ~ EMERSON.
Head full of sorrows, heart full of dreams. How to maintain the latter as life progresses? How not to let the first cancel the second?
Children don’t judge their own lives. Normal for them is what’s laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.
finally learned that sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice. And even when it’s not, those around you become uncomfortable because they think you are wise.
Back then, a good marriage didn’t require love. A good marriage meant security—money and position and a man who didn’t knock you around. We all wanted both, of course—love and security—but mostly we settled for the second and manufactured an attraction to keep from acknowledging the arranged, contractual foundation of the relationship, the mercantile nature of it.
don’t start counting days or miles. The end of every day has to leave all of us able to get up in the morning and do it all over again and then do it again day after tomorrow. You have to get your mind right, and always look way down the road, not at your feet. The slowest man sets the pace because we’re not the kind of people to leave anybody behind.
Yankees put much stock in the famous Puritan witch-killer Mather, and V had read plenty of that crazy old man’s thoughts, all the fear and dread he cursed America with down to the tenth generation. But Yankees loved to claim relation with him and all those other fanatics that came over here to establish their own flavor of dictatorship led by preacher tyrants. Winchester had made V read their writings, and even at fifteen she believed the English were right. Those people needed to be locked up. But instead, they ran to the wilderness and found the freedom to be as crazy as they wanted and to
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So, she was different because of children, beaten up by having them and loving them and losing them.
life is mostly just what happens. Choice or chance or fate, gods or not. Like it or not. Things happen, we do what we think is in our best interests or just convenient, and then we live with the consequences. When we finally start taking the long view back down the road we’ve traveled, maybe we repent. Or just dig in our heels and claim righteousness no matter how damning the evidence against us.
But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises—grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger.
You turn the other cheek too many times in this world, and before you can blink you’re wiped away.
The idea was, the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are.
However—be honest—name a marriage of equals without murderous thoughts now and then.
He’d transformed in a matter of seconds from being so busy living—fired up and blazing and tiring people down to a nub most days—to being a dead pile of meat and bones and gristle without a spark. Three or four swings of a pendulum and he was all gone.
A bad day on the road beats a good day sitting at home doing nothing.
Men often age pathetic that way, even the meanest of them. Old toothless lions that once bit your hand off begin wanting a pat on the head.
How difficult on her daily visits not to tell them to go right ahead and die at that very moment of young life while still ruled by a rising tide of emotions, those same emotions old cynical politicians and businessmen and army officers used against them to convince them to fight and die. Hard not to hold their chilly hands with ragged dirty nails and push the long hair back and kiss their sweaty brows and say, Don’t wait, do it now, not decades later when every throb of feeling ebbs, every action and choice becomes tinged with regret and harsh judgment, a sense of waste and loss and
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Like most religions, they have something to say about the consequences of bad actions, of hubris, of sins against others. Karma.
—Don’t look at your feet. Look far down the road, V said. Jeff entered the conversation, saying, By that you mean, what? —Where you want to be rather than where you are.
In a speech, you say something foolish, you can deny it later. Fog in the wind. You can claim faulty remembrance on the part of audience and press, then recast your thoughts in a better direction. If you happen to say something brilliant, all you have to do is keep saying it, and it sticks. But a book binds you to it forever, every damn word, from the moment of publication. All those permanent black marks on paper. You think you own it, but over time it owns you.
After years of loss and reflection, your old deluded decisions click together like the works of a watch packed tight within its case—many tiny, turning, interlocking wheels, each one bristling sharp-toothed with machine-cut gears. The force of every decision transferring gear to gear, wheel to wheel, each one motivating a larger energy going in no direction but steep downward to darkness at an increasing pitch. And then one morning the world resembles the wake of Noah’s flood, stretching unrecognizable to the horizon, and you wonder how you got there. One thing for sure, it wasn’t from a bad
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As Jeff neared his eightieth birthday, V often had to remind herself how much younger she was. Some days felt like a competition to determine who had become more attenuated. Like many old men who had been always ready to fight, to plunge into rage, Jeff eased down in his eighties. He became dependent on V and almost sweet.
great loss wasn’t that simple. You couldn’t just wish yourself out of it. You had to go through it all the way, had to let grief roll over you like Mississippi River floodwater until it decided to let you rise to the surface and keep going, more beaten and broken than before.
