New Life, No Instructions Quotes

“Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they’re sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you’re poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions

“The other thing I know now, is that we survive grief merely and surely by outlasting it. The ongoing fact of the narrative eclipses the heartbreak within. A deal that seems to be the price we pay for getting to hold on to our beloved dead.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions

“Real change, though, is forgiving enough to take a little failure, strong enough to take despair in small doses.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions

“But the point is not to spin the narrative; that defeats the purpose, in some way, of story itself. You can't change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn't make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don't get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions

“God is love and love is memory, and memory is a bruise or a warmth or a grocery list you cannot bear to throw away.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions

“We attach ourselves to our familiar miseries, an easier act than striking out for the territory. This is a sad truth, though not insurmountable: Despair and fear do not disappear overnight when the conditions that wrought them have changed.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions

“A version of this, though, is always going on from the moment two people's time and space collide: Subtle or direct, we are negotiating the private and public spheres. If the wounds are on the inside, we have some choice about what to reveal when, and to whom. If the scar is one the outside-the physical signature that announces itself with the nuance of a trumpet-people tend to think they know a great deal about you, whether they do or not.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions

“We love what we love in spite of ourselves, toward something larger and more generous than the velvet prison of self.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions

“Being I loved, I think, is another matter entirely, a neighboring city on the same train route, connected but by no means destiny. If and when the bond takes both ways, you have a third entity, which is the thing the lover and the loved create together. This is called history, or experience, and the strong it is, the more power it has to muck about with the sense of self.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions

“If we are lucky, we love what we love in part because the object is worth the effort. But sometimes the love itself-the elixir of desire-is enough to bestow the object with the transformative glitter it requires.”
― Gail Caldwell, New Life, No Instructions