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Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality. —Emily Dickinson
He wasn’t sure what happened to a soul when a person died in stages. His mother had died in stages. He supposed a soul was like a great fire, raging, roaring until nothing but embers remained, and embers weren’t enough to subsist on. It was better for a man—or a woman—to go completely, for the soul to not sit with the body, but to leap out and let go.
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“It doesn’t make sense to you. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense,”
What a strange vortex the years suddenly seemed. The jump from ten to twenty-five was a lifetime. The leap from twenty-five to forty was but a long weekend.
Words like “strange” reduced men and women to their oddities. To flat, unfeeling objects to be studied and dismissed. People deserved more than that.
“Just because it doesn’t make sense to you, doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense,”
He always felt better when he walked out than when he went in. Not because the church had all the answers, but because it had better answers than he did.
“Your belief is not required for something to be true,”
“I don’t care for John Philip Sousa or marching bands, but I get excited when I hear a storm. God’s cymbals, my father used to say,”
or if it was something he’d misunderstood or misremembered. What you thought you knew could lead you down paths that led to nowhere fast or, worse, to somewhere you never should have gone.
“I didn’t feel anything. I still don’t.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and met her gaze with resignation. He was not deserving of sympathy nor did he particularly need it. “When a lake freezes over, it doesn’t freeze all the way to the bottom,” Dani said. “What?” “It just freezes on the surface. The ice can be really thick . . . but there’s always water moving below it. You feel something. It’s just below the ice,” she said softly.
“Must we try everything to know something is wonderful?” she asked softly. “I don’t think so.”
“Saying that something doesn’t make sense is lazy talk,” he continued. “It’s the speech of the defeated. Too many cops do that. My job is to find the sense in it. To make sense of the incomprehensible.”
The papers are full of assumptions. Assumptions are bad information. Bad information is worse than no information. Bad information makes you blind to the truth when it comes along.”
“The truth is, the harder we are, the easier we shatter. It takes some softness to absorb life’s blows.”
“Humans are complex creatures. We want to belong, but we can’t stand to be the same. How in the world do you force equity on humankind, when we try at every turn to differentiate ourselves from each other?
