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All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.
you never really stop fighting. You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.
Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.
There are plenty of things that hurt people without people ever really knowing why. Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul.
People feel pain. And it shrinks their souls.
Religion is something between you and other people; it’s full of interpretations and theories and opinions. But faith . . . that’s just between you and God.
Any living thing that is kept behind bars for long enough eventually becomes more scared of the unknown than its own captivity.
People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem. Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.
People say she’s gone mad, because that’s what people who know nothing about loneliness call it.
He wakes up in the mornings with the feeling that someone has stolen a better life from him, an unbearable phantom pain between what he should have been and what he actually became. Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.
It was only when he had to watch a game from the stands for the first time that he realized how close adrenaline is to panic. What rouses the body to battle and achievement are the same instincts that instill mortal dread in the brain.
Shame can still catch them when they feel happy, making them wonder if it’s a betrayal of their child that they didn’t disintegrate entirely when he left them. One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism.
Everywhere, children leave silence behind them.
It doesn’t take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.
