An Open Book Quotes

“It was not until I listened to the desperately lonely people who contact The Samaritans that I began to understand what friendship is, by seeing how terrible and damaging it is to try live without it.
The knowledge of knowing of even one, not very close, friend provides some sense of belonging. If you do not belong anywhere it is hard to survive. One of the common elements in suicide is the pain of loss, and the final loss is the conviction that there is no place at all where you safely belong. You are worth nothing, not even to yourself. Especially to yourself. There becomes no point in not killing yourself.
People are able to survive for years in a deadly marriage or a dull job, because they do at least belong there. The crippling routine of housework, a production line, a viewless office with anaemic plants - even Mildred's desk and typewriter cover may be what has kept her going all these years. Simone Weil once said that what keeps people committed to a cause is not so much the cause itself, as being part of the way of life among those who serve the cause.”
― Monica Dickens, An Open Book

“Even the foreseen loss of your parents at a normal age brings shocks you have not bargained for. One is that you must finally face the fact that you are grown up. While they are alive, you can be their child, even in middle age. They stand between you and death. With both of them gone, you are next in line.
But that is nothing compared to the unexpected gap, the vast space, not a desert or emptiness, because a desert has substance, and emptiness implies containment. An infinite nothing.”
― Monica Dickens, An Open Book

“Recent memory replays like a film. For instance, if I think of our Christmas party last year, I see movement and colour and hair as people mill about, hands raised in greeting, a head thrown back in laughter. There are babies and doting women on the kitchen floor, bent backs converging on the bread and cheese like grackles at the bird feeder, the swirl of a skirt as the piano starts and someone dances, the young girls of my family moving through the crowd with their bright beautiful faces among the middle-aged. Far off memory comes more in stills than moving pictures. Of a whole chunk of your life, you may be left with a few stock shots, motion arrested to capture the essence of a span of time.”
― Monica Dickens, An Open Book