Bourbon_bookworm > Bourbon_bookworm's Quotes

“It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“To be a loving mother was to be known for a service, but to be a lovely mother was to possess a charm all your own.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Save your tears for when your mother dies.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“The books taught me that when we live through traumatic experiences, our brains take in the things around us that are causing the greatest threat, and they encode these things deep into our subconscious as sources of danger.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“In Gretchen Schmelzer’s excellent, gentle book, Journey Through Trauma, she insists on the fifth page: “Some of you may choose a therapist: a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, counselor, or member of the clergy. Some of you may choose some form of group therapy. But I am telling you up front, at the beginning: in order to heal, you will need to get help. I know you will try to look for the loophole in this argument—try to find a way that you can do this on your own—but you need to trust me on this. If there were a way to do it on your own I would have found it. No one looked harder for that loophole than I did.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“I've always said there are forest people and desert people. Forest people are nurturing and fertile, but they have a tendency to hide behind their branches. I'm a desert person. Hard and acerbic and difficult to endure, but honest. You always know what you're getting in the desert because there isn't anywhere to hide. In that dry air, you can see a storm coming from ten miles away.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“I learned two critical things that day. First: Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“It is hard to look into someone's eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gest to choose is the backdrop”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“I think it's easy when you're neglecting your own happiness to inadvertently neglect the happiness of the people you love. It's sort of like you think you're being selfless or self-sacrificial or something, but really you're just sowing misery everywhere you go.”
― Antonia Angress, Sirens & Muses

“Grief is a solitary animal. It prefers to prowl at night. It certainly won't come out when hunted.”
― Shoshana von Blanckensee, Girls Girls Girls

“In the days that followed I thought about grief; how nothing and nobody can prepare you for it. People tell you their stories but until you experience it for yourself you can't possibly understand. There's no going around it. Or under or over it. You've got to go through it. It will hit you in waves so enormous that the you are smacked against the shore. It will fabric of your life, so that everything you do is stained by it; every moment, good or bad, is steeped in sadness for a while. Even the nice moments, the achievements and successes, are permeate very tinged with the knowledge that someone something is missing. And the first time that you smile or laugh, you catch yourself, because happiness feels so unfamiliar.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“For better or for worse, I am my mother's daughter, and her story is my story too. It's mine to carry, mine to hold - with love if I can manage it - and mine to weave into my own.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“Whatever your brain tells you - that you're useless, that you're broken, that you're unfixable - just hear it, acknowledge it and try to let it pass. You are not broken just because your brain says so.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“We are both wounded in our own way and, like a pair of tectonic plates shifting over time, our wounds will gradually grate against one another’s, causing damage at a glacial pace. Neither one of us will notice until it’s too late.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“We accept the love we're used to”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“I was trapped in the space between grief and healing, no longer the person I was, not yet the person I would be, with no choice but to endure it.”
― Hazel Hayes, Better by Far

“How odd that the language of grief is one of loss—people describe feeling empty, hollow, carved out—when for me, grief is heavy. There’s a weight to it. A density.”
― Hazel Hayes, Better by Far

“What if it was love at first sight? What if Finn was your soulmate?” “Okay, firstly, I think we’ve proven he wasn’t. But secondly, I don’t believe in love at first sight. And I don’t believe in soulmates. I believe that with seven billion people knocking about, there’s bound to be at least a couple hundred you could happily spend the rest of your life with. Some of whom you’ll never meet. Some of whom you’ll meet at the wrong time. And some of whom you’ll meet and never even know you met.”
― Hazel Hayes, Better by Far

“This is why the cloak of grief hangs so heavy; it’s not one cloak, but two. And on days when I can hardly move under the weight of it, I remind myself that grief and love are intricately woven together, and healing isn’t about shedding one or the other, it’s about becoming strong enough to bear them both. This pain is a productive pain, a fortifying pain, no different to the itchy ache of bones that knit together after breaking. And just like broken bones need rest, so too do hearts. Like days when the words won’t come, I see these pauses now as part of the process. With life, as with art, there’s the in breath, the out breath, and the space in between. And this is where I feel you most, in the space between breath.”
― Hazel Hayes, Better by Far

“Grief" doesn't even come close-its paltry five letters no less crude a symbol of the thing they are supposed to represent than a stick-figure drawing of a person; they lack all the nuance, magnitude, and magic of the real thing.”
― Hazel Hayes, Better by Far

“The grief glitch, I call it: those little lapses—usually between sleeping and waking, or when you're fully focused on another task—when you forget that someone is gone and you're forced to remind yourself. It's like receiving the news all over again.”
― Hazel Hayes, Better by Far

“Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

“And no one is obliged to learn something from loss. This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they are still in the fetal position...The most practical thing I have learned is the power of the present tense. The past is quicksand and the future is unknowable, but in the present, you get to float. Nothing is missing, nothing is hypothetical.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

“Heavy is the enchantment of places you know you will never see again.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

“Human beings are the only animals that experience denial. All creatures will try to survive under attack, will burrow when under siege or limp through the forest. But they recognize trouble when it hits. Not one fish, in the history of fish, having gotten its fins chewed off, needs another fish's perspective: I don't know, Tom, that looks pretty bad. Denial is humankind'a specialty, our handy aversion. We are so allergic to our own mortality; we'll do anything to make it not so. Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity. But it can't be helped.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People