The Still Point of the Turning World Quotes

“The standards for what is "normal" have become so formalized and yet so restrictive that people need a break from that horrible feeling of never being able to measure up to whatever it is they think will make them acceptable to other people and therefore to themselves. People get sick with this idea of change; I have been sick with it. We search for transformation in retreats, juice fasts, drugs and alcohol, obsessive exercise, extreme sports, sex. We are all trying to escape our existence, hoping that a better version of us is waiting just behind that promotion, that perfect relationship, that award or accolade, that musical performance, that dress size, that raucous night at a party, that hot night with a new lover. Everyone needs to be pursuing something, right? Otherwise, who are we? How about, quite simply, people? How about human?”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“Ronan taught me that children do not exist to honor their parents; their parents exist to honor them. [...] Ronan was mine but he never belonged to me. This is not an issue of ownership. A child is not a couch.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“You can, for just a moment, fuse grief like a bone, but the memory of the ability to bend lingers inside, like an itch running in the blood, just beneath the skin: relief is always only temporary. Grief, we understood, would now hijack a part of our day for the rest of our lives, sneaking in, making the world momentarily stop, every day, forever.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“Tucked inside the moments of this great sadness - this feeling of being punctured, scrambling and stricken - were also moments of the brightest, most swollen and logic shattering happiness I've ever experienced. One moment would be a wall of happiness so tall it could not be scaled; the next felt like falling into a pit of sadness that had no bottom. I realized you could not have one without the other, that this great capacity to love and be happy can be experienced only with this great risk of having happiness taken from you - to tremble, always, on the edge of loss.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“Why are we so afraid of the body? Is it because it's a mess, unpredictable, mortal, unreliable? We take pains to perfect it, to keep it healthy, but we probably wouldn't go to such extremes if we weren't scared to death to lose it. A paradox: we pretend we don't need it, that it's our minds that matter, and yet the body is the thing we can't ignore and that knocks our thinking minds flat to the floor.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“There was nothing expected of or for him. In that love he was free.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“In other words, rendering loss was a way of honoring life.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“And although I no longer identified with the stringency or dogma of organized Christian religion, I remained drawn to the compassion and sense of community that still existed in houses of worship.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“One of our teachers at Upaya told us that Jizao Bodhisattva, the boatman who ferries the dead across the river, the companion of travelers between worlds, is also the guardian of children. Was it too much to ask to be on that same boat, even if for a moment, ferried across with my son in my arms, or worn in a front pack? I'd sit at the back and let his feet dangle in the water, slip the smallest coin in his mouth, another in mine, pay for the passage for both of us. Because I know, in whatever final lucid moment I have before I die, I will see Ronan's face, and I will wish I could hold him one last time before I, too, am released from this body and make my own crossing from this life into whatever comes next.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“I knew after Ronan was gone, I would listen for him each night, and his face would be the first face I'd think of in the morning, the face I'd always miss. This missing would be a daily ritual for the rest of my life. And I would continue scribbling, hoping it would help me reach the end intact or sane, and I did it knowing that any scribble might be my last. I will look at the many photos of him, wanting to forget, longing to reexamine particular moments or recall little details about his face. And the world was still the world, and yet...”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“It is a unique and terrible privilege to witness the entire arc of a life, to see it through from its inception to its end. But it is also an opportunity to love without a net, without the future, without the past, but right now.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“Who counts in this world and how much? Who does the deciding? Who has "potential" (that is, value) and who does not? On the patio, thunder rumbled in the distance and Ronan squirmed against my chest, complaining a bit. What did matter was love, given freely and without agenda or expectation. I loved Ronan, this unique person, this human being, without thought to what it might lead to for me, what it might say about me, or what it made others think about me. It didn't matter if people thought the situation was tragic or the saddest this in the world, or they thought I'd gone wild with grief or become a mean and manic bitch. So what? This was my son, my baby, my 'handful of earth', sitting on my lap, cooing and squawking into an approaching thunderstorm under a dropped and thickening sky, the wind whipping through his hair as if her were on a roller coaster, feeling the fresh change in the air. Oh, I loved him. But that love would not chain him. There was nothing expected of or for him. In that love he was free. A love that was settled and calm, with no more thinking to do. A love that left people speechless, confused, delirious with misunderstanding.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“Ronan lived in the world held by people who loved him and fed him and talked with him and met him on his own terms. When he died, he will have been fully loved from his first breath to his last and then after. That full uncompromising love, powerful and sometimes painful, was perhaps the only miracle worth believing in.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“Sitting with Ronan on the couch I often thought 'How can I make this moment more precious?
and then I'd realize with a sense of panic that no additional meaning needed to be sought or found. This was all there was. 'But still', I would think, 'What if I can't remember the way his hands feel, his hair. What if I forget how he smells? The sound of his laugh? The shape of his two front teeth?' Time was both too contracted and forever seeming.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“Ronan was making me think, yes, and he was making me think about thinking (Hegel would be pleased), but my task as his myth writer was still to understand my son as a person and a being who was independent of me and yet dependent on my actions, my attention, and my love. I would not and will never do his the disservice of regarding him as an angel or telling myself that God had "other" plans for him, and for me. My plan was simple and yet impossible: to go with him as far as I could along this journey that we call life, to be with him as deeply as I could from moment to moment, and then to let him go.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“The meaning of Ronan's life was not to teach me; we often say this about people who defy our notions of normal and I find it pathetic, patronizing, and a way of distancing ourselves from our own fragile bodies and tenuous lives. I don't believe that disabled people exist to teach people life stories- that is not their purpose; it isn't anyone's purpose. We are not "the disabled", some shapeless, teeming mass of nonnormative bodies designed for teaching purposes, like some kind of specially designed pedagogical barbarian horde.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“Who counts in this world and how much? Who does the deciding? Who has “potential” (that is, value) and who does not?”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World

“And Ronan was making me think, yes, and he was making me think about thinking (Hegel would be pleased), but my task as his myth writer was still to understand my son as a person and a being who was independent of me and yet dependent on my actions, my attention, my love.”
― Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World