Wild Dark Shore Quotes

“But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I understand it so simply now, it is a love that lives in the body but unlike the body it never dissolves. It lasts forever.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“But the dandelion—this single flower that has given nourishment to countless other living creatures—is considered a weed.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I close my eyes, drinking it all in, knowing it is a place in time that I will never forget. The world is dangerous and we will not survive it. But there is this. Impermanent as it may be.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“There is such peril in loving things at all, and he feels sort of proud, in fact, that he just keeps on doing it.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“Maybe that's what being a parent is. Expanding to be more. Asking of yourself more, for them.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“What a mystery it was to me then: how she knew what temperature to keep the room overnight and what to dress the babies in so they’d be warm but not overly so, how she knew when to give paracetamol for a fever, and what times they needed to sleep depending on how old they were, and when to bring them into our beds for cuddles and when to be strict about sleep skills, and what the fuck sleep skills are, and not to use soap in their baths, and to try olive oil for the cradle cap, and which foods were safe for starting solids, and exactly how to serve them. How did she know all of this? It must have been built in, that’s what I thought. When Orly came along and it was just me, I realized how she’d known. She’d fucking learned. She’d had to, because somebody had to keep the babies alive, and so she bloody well got on with it.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I think I finally understand your words. It’s just a body. They hold on or they don’t. You’re right, it’s nothing to be frightened of. Mine will become the salt of this water. And every time you swim it will be me upon your skin.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I think of this life, of my life, of the things I built and planted. I have been lucky to know such richness. But I also think of how my husband taught me something else, something so wrong I am stunned that I ever believed it: that in the face of the world's end love should shrink. (p.290)”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“Most of what I do with my days is repair things that are gonna break again soon. I just fix them and then when they break I fix them again. It’s like pushing shit up a hill.” “So why do you do it?” “Because someone has to, or everything just stays broken.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“she isn't frightened of the dead. It is only the living who have the power to harm.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“Here is the nature of life, we must love things with our whole selves knowing they will die.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I think, deep in the darkest hours, that even if she survives this night that ocean will have her back one day.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else. Mine are the blood of me, and the oxygen in that blood, the airflow and the neurons firing and the stretch and release of muscles in limbs, they are the foundations that make up my skeleton, all the collagen and calcium upon which I stand and fall, and the pulse and the flow and the beat. But I think maybe this is too much for them to be. The breath of a man. The life of him. I think it is too heavy a thing for children to carry.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“Loving a place is the same as having a child. They are both too much an act of hope, of defiance. And those are a fool’s weapons.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I am astounded at the unlikelihood of bringing my children to a place so remote and still have something so terrible happen to her. Maybe it is not unlikely at all. Where men go there is harm.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“But what is the use of safety if it deprives you of everything else?”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“What I miss is having someone to look at in moments like these, someone who understands not just the talent or cleverness of our children but the wisdom, the immensity of feeling they hold within. Instead I marvel at them alone.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“But as night falls and we slide wearily into bed, I hear the patter of small feet and there is a boy climbing in with me, and he tells me the story of the dinosaur trees. And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“The world is dangerous and we will not survive it. But there is this. Impermanent as it may be.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“In the years we have been together it has become very clear to me that he does not see me at all. I am actually not so bothered by this; what an ordeal it would be, to be known.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“It is really fucking sad that it should take loss to know the precise quality of love.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.”

He isn’t listening to me, but I don’t expect him to. He never did.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“Oh, how I had coasted upon the back of this woman, deep in the trenches with her and also very happy to let her learn all the things and know all the things.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“He wonders if this is what he is, all that he is, a leaf battered by one wind or the other.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I remember a morning, one of many that all bleed together in my mind. A morning I rose, shattered by grief and weariness, stumbling into our living room in the city. I remember wondering why I could hear no crying, no morning calls for a bottle, and then seeing my son on his back in a shaft of sunlight, with the small lean bodies of my older children laid around him, I remember their fingers tickling his belly and his smile, his first smile. They looked up at me with such awe, such delight. A smile, Dad! He's smiling! And I thought, this is why we survive.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“They do not seem like they could belong to the same species, but maybe it is the animal in me that feels the love, the human that can detach from it.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore