The Silver Dark Sea Quotes

“Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you - others may grieve for the same soul, but they do not grieve exactly for what you also grieve. No-one has lost precisely what you have lost. Not exactly, never exactly. We are in it alone.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“We carry them with us... We breathe for them, sing for them soak up stories that they cannot hear. We think they would have loved this...

And we smile for them, on their behalf.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“...grieving needs space, and it needs so much time. And it needs to be done; it cannot be trodden round or not looked in the eye.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“Isn't it the rarest thing? Never mind the whale migrations, or total eclipses of suns and moons: love that lasts, and is returned in equal measure, is the rarest thing she knows of.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“I know this: there is no sense to grief. There is no pattern or shape or texture, and there are no books or stories which can lessen the pain at losing a person you have loved, and will always love. There are no rules, with loss.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“It is an extraordinary world - full of love, grief, coincidence - and we shall never understand it. We should never try to. We should only be grateful for it. I reckon we should love, breathe, and say all will be well and believe it. And we should share our best stories, as often as we can.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“Strange, what the heart can bear. It can carry grief beyond measure. It can bear a weight that is too great to speak of. But a heart can't bear the world. It has its limits...”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“It takes so little... to lose it; grief and disappointment can takes one's faith away so easily that you might wake one morning and have none left.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“Carefully, she stands. And she runs her hand across the top of Thomasina's gravestone as she leaves, like how, as girls, they would let go of hands - gradually, moving their fingertips over each other's palms, as gently as raindrops. She has done this for sixty-eight years and there is a dip on the stone from this. She has worn the stone down with her loving goodbyes.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“...she had a theory that you should try to fill your life with people with wrinkles next to their eyes because it means they've got it right; they've lived and laughed...”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“...I told her that letting go is not a choice, in many ways. You try to move on, perhaps. But it comes of its own accord, in the end; it happens when it is ready to, and it mostly comes by without announcement or being noticed at all. I'll always miss my husband. I won't ever be the person I was before... You don't mend fully, I tell her. But you mend enough, in time.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“I have learnt that nothing stays the same. Today might seem the same as yesterday but no day ever is; we may want no changes to ever come, but changes do, in time. They cannot be helped; it is how the world turns.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“Rona of the hurting heart. We've all had one of those. We have all picked at the seal of things that have been closed against us, and locked.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“Hope. It is the frailest of words.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“That was Leah, before the fade came. Before the sea mist of depression rolled in without much warning and dampened her, softened her so that she had less strength. She had always been sensitive - that was the word he'd heard for her and it was the right word. She saddened at the lobsters that Tom hauled ashore; she bruised, as ripe fruits do...

Still. There is something in Leah. A flash of metal. A piece of grit in the pearl.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“She never choose anything except her husband, her motherhood and her trust in God. The rest of it was put upon her and she bears it and does her best.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“I cannot talk of the power of want, of how much desire can do. I don't think it can be measured. I think want is forgotten too quickly or dismissed as being worth far less than the other feelings -love, hate, envy. But to want something ... To wish for it so much that you think you cannot last, your heart and body cannot continue to hunger for something as much as this. It comes from loss. We want what we do not have. We want what we had, but don't now.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“But they fly. It is what fledged birds must do, and she's always known that. The nest can't always be full.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“...the north wind has both mended hearts and broken them. It has brought both beauty and misfortune, restlessness and sleep. It has carried in babies but it has also taken lives and so the islanders worry when they hear the north wind blowing. They fear death - actual, physical, permanent death, but also the non-literal, where the heart has kept beating but its wish to keep doing so is small, very small if there at all.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“He thinks he can see all her grief in her face, all her love and empty days.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“They are two brothers whose language to each other is mostly the farm, and the weather, or sport, but it is rarely a language that talks of the past or of what they think and feel. They sit, like stones.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea

“...They all try to see more of her, but she hides herself away.

It is not how Kitty would grieve. She, if she had to, would grieve wildly - with noise, mucus, paint on the canvas, blustery walks on beaches, curse words and exhausted sleep. But everyone grieves differently just as everyone loves in different ways.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea