One Hundred Names for Love Quotes

“And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“So much in a relationship changes when a partner is seriously ill, helpless yet blameless, and indefatigably needy. I felt old. [p. 99]


The animal part of him in pain accepted my caring. But the part of himself watching himself in that pain didn't believe I could ever respect him again. None of this crossed my mind. I couldn't risk knowing it. No one could and continue caregiving. They'd feel so unappreciated and wronged that it would drive them away. [p. 100]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules seemed to enter each cell, weighing it down... I ghosted between islands of anxiety... a fatigue that dulled my zest, decanted it. Sorrow felt like a marble coat I couldn’t shed.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir

“A life like an intricately woven basket, frayed, worn, broken, unraveled, reworked, reknit from many of its original pieces... Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Myself, I've always been organized in waves. For months on end, slowly descending into disorder, I drift with the status quo. Then I wake up one morning with a sudden compulsion to color-code my socks or stack them vertically.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“A caregiver is changed by the culture of illness, just as one is changed by the dynamic era in which one lives. For one thing, I don't have as much time in conversation with myself, and I feel the loss. Certainly I worry more about his death, and mine too, since I;m so much a part of the evolving saga of his health, which I have to monitor every day. But I've grown stronger in every aspect of my life. In small ways: speaking more directly with people. In large ways: discovering I can handle adversity and potential loss and yet keep going. I've a better idea of my strength. I feel like I've been tested, like a willow whipped around violently in a hurricane, but still stranding, its roots strong enough to hold. [p. 301]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Out of the blue, Paul reported feeling bouts of calm euphoria, a mystical sense of all's-right-with-his-life-and-the-universe, a bright future in sight. ... I knew well the state of vigorous calm he meant, a frequent visitor throughout my own life. [p. 290]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“It's like having a head full of holes, in which the perfect repository of words have shamed themselves," he lamented.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Much more. We're joined at the heart."
"Bad luck for you, I'm afraid. My ticker's pretty wonky."
"Too much boozing."
His eyes twinkled, and he drew me close. "Not enough kissling.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Our days flowed around well-charted, often traveled courses, and yet, the underlying sense of falling out of time, out of the trajectory of one's life, not by choice, but by subtraction, was frequent and disquieting. Then I grieved for him, for the lost and previous Paul. He grieved for that man too. Both our griefs were mainly private, internal, unuttered. Return was impossible, and there was only one direction open ; and so we kept our compass pointed forward. [p. 286]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“I'd suffered many losses in recent years after my father mother uncle aunt and cousin had all passed away. In her final years my mother often lamented that there was no one alive who had known her as a girl and I was starting to understand how spooked she'd felt. I wasn't sure I could take any more abandonments. One succumbs so easily to mind spasms, worry spasms. [p. 95]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Our lives together, our duet, also continues to evolve, and even if we can’t go back to how it was, we’re designing a good life for us, in spite of everything.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir

“I do feel responsible. He used to be able to look after himself. Now he can't. That's so different, so strange. The big question is: Is more improvement really possible, or should I stop pushing him?' [p. 153]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth. ... Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? ... Time becomes even more elastic than usual--minutes can stretch for ages and days suddenly snap together. [p. 97]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Sometimes with a flutter of agitated worry that felt like a beetle was trapped inside my ribs. p. 90”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“What remained would gradually acquire its own shape and dimension, but many of our favorite things, my favorite ways of being a couple, had vanished and it was no use pretending, hoping, wishing that he would return to his old self, and me to mine. [p. 156]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Caregiving offers many fringe benefits, including the sheer sensory delight of nourishing and grooming, sharing, and playing. But caregiving does buttonhole you; you're stitched in one place. . . . Paul wasn't on a learning curve but seemed trapped in a circle. He's swoop forward only to loop back again and fall to earth.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Only by fumbling with countless bits of knowledge, and then ignoring most of it, does a creative mind craft something original.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir

“I understood the therapists were trying to rebuild Paul's vocabulary, beginning wit the rudiments, but Paul found it taxing, boring, and disturbingly condescending. His loss of language didn't mean he was any less a grown-up with adult feelings, experiences, worries, and problems. [p. 144]”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They’re never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos—a cult of two with fallible gods.”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir

“Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

“A perfect balance is possible to imagine, but impossible to reach, so one is always trembling along an arc from too excited to too bored and back again. Everything we love most—be it sweetheart or flower—looks majestic because it seems to be trembling out of balance. While”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir

“The Aphasia Handbook: A Guide for Stroke and Brain Injury Survivors and Their Families, by Martha Taylor Sarno and Joan Peters—an essential guide from the National Aphasia Association; and Coping with Aphasia, by Jon G. Lyon, addressed to patients and caregivers alike, explaining what to expect, chronologically, with aphasia. In”
― Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir