The Correspondent Quotes

“Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.” This feels like the truest thing I have ever read. I guess there’s no bottom to a person, but I feel you have left fewer stones unturned than anyone else who’s ever passed through, and it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that, Theodore.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I didn't know it was happiness at the time, because it felt like busyness and exhaustion and financial stress and self doubt.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I know you think of me as your mother only, but please remember, inside I am also just a girl.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I know you know this, but I want to repeat that when someone(s) treats you poorly, it is a reflection of him or herself and the misery within the heart of them. It doesn’t help a bit to hear that when you’re young, but later it will.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid,”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it?”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“How cruel life is only this long. Now that I see clearly, I’d like more time.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“when someone(s) treats you poorly, it is a reflection of him or herself and the misery within the heart of them.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“Gilbert has never left me, and the circumstances of his death have never for one day diminished, and as I age it feels so strange that the majority of people with whom I come in contact don’t have the slightest inkling that he ever lived. I had him for so much less time than I’ve lived without him, and yet his presence is enormous, though I keep it to myself.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I wonder, was I always lonely? I’m not sure I’ve ever felt at home in the world, but I’m not sure that’s unique.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“with age I have learned my feelings and my experience are, sadly, not unique. Terrible things happen. We make choices. Time cannot be rewound. The good that comes out of the bad can be unbearable.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“You get the one life. It’s awfully unfair, isn’t it?”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about.
I wish someone would have thought to say to me, earlier on, 'Sybil, over and over again serpents will emerge from the bottom of the sea and grab you by the feet.' Of course I didn't say anything of the sort to my own children, and I probably never would.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“You are a wonderful, interesting woman, full of love and kindness, but you are so damn stubborn and determined you know exactly what is right in every situation.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives;”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside. Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace…. Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. Joan Didion, “On the Morning After the Sixties,” The White Album”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“It was agonizing because it felt so true to the experiences of my own life”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“It appears the matter is not one of policy, but of your caprice.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“And yes, I will go into the year as you said: boldly, unapologetically, head up and not taking bullshit from anyone with a penis. You seem a worthy person to offer such advice.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“Someone I loved very much said once to me there is no parallel universe; there is no ‘what could have been if only.’ How I wish there was.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“am an old woman and my life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I guess I was considered somewhat odd. I wasn’t a cheerful, frivolous little girl interested in dolls and drawing. I was serious and rather grave. Watchful, wary. I was a skeptic. I didn’t have many friends. I read a great deal. I was reading all the time.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent