The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Or we might wish to blot out an episode forever because we behaved so poorly on that day—we were mortifyingly selfish, or foolish to an extraordinary degree.

“Well, child, you may do whatever you like with your suffering,” Hanneke said mildly. “It belongs to you.

“Where there is life, George, there is still hope. Death is so terribly final. It will come soon enough to us all. I would hesitate to wish it hastened upon anyone.”

In general, she was not adept at untruths, and he, in particular, was not a person she wished to deceive.

Human Time was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever existed.

But she supposed this was the way of life—prejudice and ignominy and their sorry like.

I believe that it must have been a dreadful blow to man’s opinion of himself when Galileo announced that we do not reside at the center of the universe—just as it was a blow to the world when Darwin announced that we were not specially crafted by God in one miraculous moment. I believe these things are difficult for most people to hear. I believe it makes people feel insignificant.

I have disappointed myself in my own behavior, and others have disappointed me.