Caitlin Gaudio > Caitlin's Quotes

“I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside”
― Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Still, there's no denying that in some sense I 'feel better,' and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one's unhappiness....What is behind it? Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Her absence is like the sky spread over everything.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often—will it be for always?—how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment’? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. They”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“A thing like this, dreaded for so long, finally arrives and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“In truth, at first it is a protective stance, a shrinking from further pain, because I am drained limp from crying, and to speak about it would be to cry again. But later it is because I want to sit alone with my grief. I want to protect—hide? hide from?—these foreign sensations, this bewildering series of hills and valleys.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief