We Loved It All Quotes

“And sometimes it seems clear to me that the normalcy most of us cling to so stubbornly—assuming it like a cloak against the changing weather—is also a paralysis. A blithe insistence on the continuity of daily life. It must go on, it can’t go on, it goes on.”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“the word spirit comes from words meaning “breath,” while the word soul, in some etymologies, is said to have come from the Proto-Germanic word for “sea.” Coming from, or belonging to, the sea. Soul and spirit are the stuff of water and air. Vast and amorphous bodies, forces of powerful tides and winds—the life-giving media of the earth. What if the spirit and the soul we have are shared? What if they exist, like the ocean and the atmosphere, in a great pool? As a collective we already always belong to, into which we offer particles of ourselves?”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“Even in darkness, unseen, a living thing breathes with its own particular glory. Its own rhythm of existence, never exactly the same as the next. An extraordinary experience of being, even within a so-called ordinary life.”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“Whatever the flaws and tragedies of language, whatever the pitfalls of disclosure and definition, we have to speak our love to make it known. And our loss. We have to mourn each disappearance. No death is deeper than an extinction. In our rush to get past the grief of death, we also rush past the exuberance of being alive.”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“If regret is the ghost of the past, for me, extinction is the ghost of the future. Now my worry is less about leaving than of what will be left. I hate the feeling. And yet that turning outward of fear may be the only thing of true value that I’ve ever learned.”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“remembering too much can be a hindrance. There’s a storehouse of personal guilts at the back of my mind filled with a motley assortment of choices, moments, and faces—mistakes I made and opportunities I missed. I visit this storehouse so rarely the lock’s gotten rusty; inside the bare bulbs have burned out. Cobwebs hang between the statues of friends I allowed to fall away, small betrayals I perpetrated, failures of understanding. Blunt remarks I should have left unsaid. Even the killing of one small toad. And a few injuries that I received in return, too. Hurts suffered and shelved away where they can do less harm. So I’ve been grateful, on occasion, for forgetfulness as well as memory: it feels like liberation to be allowed, by the workings of my own mind, to walk away from that locked shed. Forgetting”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“Some argue that this idea of the inevitability of cultural decline is itself a pernicious story—that it offers a grand permission to modern economic colonizers to plunder and supersede. That it’s a simple extension of the deadly logic of capital,”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“To us the large, fast, and polluting cars we’ve become accustomed to—much like large and fast guns, unlimited in their power and lethality—are liberty. We’re deathly afraid it might not be available without these items. Yet the possibility of liberty preexisted them both.”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“The amassing of facts is only one aspect of education; the ability to think critically is another. But such thinking requires receptiveness to information.”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life