Ben

“After I couldn't remember any more except in a general way what she looked like, I could still remember the sound of her voice, and I clung to that.
I also clung to the idea that if things remained exactly the way they were, if we were careful not to take a step in any direction from the place where we were now, we would somehow get back to the way it was before she died. I knew that this was not a rational belief, but the alternative - that when people die they are really gone and I would never see her again - was more than I could manage then or for a long time afterward.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“And looking at these faded snapshots I see, the child that survives in me sees with a pang that - I am old enough to be that man's father, and he has been dead for nearly twenty years, and yet it troubles me that he was happy. Why? In some way his happiness was at that time (and forever after, it would seem) a threat to me. It was not the kind of happiness that children are included in, but why should that trouble me now? I do not even begin to understand it.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead. Making plants grow.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Now was the moment to forget about that door I tud walked through without thinking, and about the void that could sometimes be bridged in dreams, and about the way things used to be when my mother was alive. Instead, I dung to them more tightly than ever, even as I was being drawn willy-nilly into my father's new life.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow