Love and Other Ways of Dying Quotes

“Perhaps we really are surrounded by the past, made prisoners of it. No matter how far we travel, how hard we try to forget, the scarred tree forever stands by the side of the road, if only in our minds. The only way to drive by is to set the past straight, once and for all, by remembering.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“Grief is schizophrenic. You find yourself of two minds, the one that governs your days up until the moment of grief—the one that opens easily to memories of the girl at six, twelve, eighteen—and the one that seeks to destroy everything afterward.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“Laughing brings out the good in food. It’s good to laugh. If you don’t laugh, you’re going to magnify. And if you magnify, you’re going to die.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“you can do nothing to stop the ocean or the sky from what it will do.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying. And along its highways and byways, the country seems less ready to leap into the future than it is already clinging to a sepia-toned past when America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in a Manichean world of good and evil, capitalists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of the interstate—the perpetual clusters of Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Denny’s, and Burger King—are crowded with people strangely reclaiming bygone days, connecting themselves to some prior eating experience, reveling in the familiar. We gas”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“It’s the drunkenness of all the new things that can be.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“we’re beholden not to look away from the things we fear or revere.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays