Memorial Days Quotes

“merely wish for the bereaved some time and space, however long, however short, for melancholy—what Victor Hugo described as the happiness of being sad.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“In her essay “On Grief” Jennifer Senior quotes a therapist who likens the survivors of loss to passengers on a plane that has crashed into a mountaintop and must find their way down. All have broken bones; none can assist the others. Each will have to make it down alone.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“that it is an extraordinary chance to have existed at all, a rare and marvelous happenstance to have lived and experienced consciousness.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Do your work. It might not be your best work, but it will be good work, and it will be what saves you.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“In his writing, he was always at his funniest, his smartest, his most thoughtful, and his most courageous and adventurous. Prose so good it would make you laugh until you cried. I recognize now his books are not the shade of him, they’re the quintessence of his soul, the distillation of a great adventurer and a good man. He’s still with us through those books.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“That howl has become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless,”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“I make more time for the beauty. I make it a point to notice the trees, in all their various seasonal personalities. To be with the critters that share my space. A nest of baby rabbits, a coin-sized painted turtle hatchling, a fluffy mallard duckling out for its first swim—these encounters, more than almost anything else, have the power to elevate me out of sadness.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“asked Mr. Horwitz about Disneyland. ‘It has always been my dream,’ he said, ‘to go there and take my children on the tea-cup ride.’ Then the protester resumed shouting ‘Death to America!”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“I held his hand. I didn't want to ever let it go.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“At one point I dreamed of him. He was present, alive. It was a warm, loving dream with no dark edges. Then I came fully awake. I lost him a second time.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“So, I accepted an expatriation I did not want and raised my sons in a country whose values and choices often felt incomprehensible.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“My imprinted horizon is the Pacific Ocean, framed by sandstone headlands and sinuous gum trees; my pellucid sky contains the Southern Cross. But it’s more than landscape for me. It’s also a national personality. An informal, self-deprecating style of moving through the world with a grin on your face and a hand ready to be chucked back to help the mate who might be lagging. A national consensus that tends to value the good of the many over the desires of the individual.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“the island’s rocks put me in my place”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“And then I understand that I have not been alone. I am reveling in this time because I am with Tony. In this solitude, finally, I can think about him undistracted. I can read his journals and commune with his thoughts. I can even do what I believed his death had denied me: learn new things about him.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“For the first time I experienced a place where nature is big and we are small. I understood that wilderness was what my human brain and body had been adapted to for millennia and that the only life I’d known, in a crowded city, was a profoundly unnatural habitat for my species.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“Contrary to TV shows, hardly anyone who collapses with ventricular fibrillation comes back through CPR unless they are in a hospital with a code team and a crash cart. Of the 356,000 incidences of cardiac arrest outside hospitals in the United States every year, revival chances, according to The New England Journal of Medicine, are less than 5 percent.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“I remember especially these lines from Mary Oliver: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“Our Aussie friends had a healthier work-life balance and while we lived there, we did, too. But I couldn’t keep Tony there.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“Had we been observant Jews, I would have had a road map through my grief, telling me exactly what to do and when to do it.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“Josh and I slumped on the sofa. He’d lost his brother. I’d lost the love of my life. We’d both lost a best friend.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“an extraordinary chance to have existed at all, a rare and marvelous happenstance to have lived and experienced consciousness.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“distinguished American historian with a singular voice, full of compassion and delight and wry observations and self-deprecating humor—layers that covered but never obscured his deep and abiding moral seriousness about the task of the historian as the conscience of a nation.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“Take control of this essential moment in the narrative of your life.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“And finally, in whatever way works for you, tell your story. Write it down, speak it to a therapist, share it with your friends.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“He had advice for me, he said, that could not wait: the three most salient lessons of his own loss. Make it safe for people to talk about Tony, he said. The first time he had ventured out after losing his beloved wife, Gretchen, no one had mentioned her, and he had been hurt and angered. He realized that he needed to speak of her first, to allow others to do so. This was excellent advice, and I still follow it, bringing Tony with me into every conversation.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“I resolve to appreciate the life I have had, surrounded by love, in another rare and beautiful place.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“I take the weight of it and hurl it back into the air, another howl. Under again, then toward the east, the place of the first light. The light Tony will never see again. I wail for him, for the life he no longer has, for the life we no longer have together.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“I let the sound form, I let it uncurl like a fern. I howl, emptying my lungs. The sound, loud and raw in this world of silence, is shocking. I let myself sink again, come up and face the blazing colors of the sky. The going down of the sun seems to mark a more final ending than simply a day. This day, any day, could be the last day. We all know that. Now I feel it.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days