A Body, Undone Quotes

“Writing, no matter the subject, has its way with the writer. Writing helps to teach us what we can't know otherwise, which makes it a demanding and invaluable discipline. Writing offers, not a way out, but a way into the impossible dilemmas of not-knowing. Each sentence begun can wander off, sometimes irretrievably into confusion and mistake,s sometimes to greater clarity. Tropes transport memories and transform them, as resin is transformed under pressure into amber, sometimes with a small, ancient bit of life suspended inside. Amber can be remarkably clear, but the piece that conserves a suspended life is even more valuable. Writing works on memory, compressing and doubtless distorting the past, and offers bodies for the inspection of reader and writer alike.

Writing has turned me in ways I didn't know I was going to go -- both outward and inward.... I've reach backward in memory to my childhood and young adulthood, but the process of writing has taken me forward, and continues to do so. Sentences unfold before me, always into the future, even as I return and work over what's already there.”
― Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain

“Our lives are intertwined, and my life is not mine alone, but shared with her. My living makes her life better, and she tells me so -- it's that simple and that profound. I think it's accurate to call my injuries "catastrophic," and it's a testament to the sheer durability of our feelings for each other that the love that was so vital and alive before the accident survived without a scratch. This fact, more than any other, makes my inexpressibly difficult life livable...”
― Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain

“I understand every day that I'm faced with an impossible choice -- remembrance of things past or living into a future that is troubling, even terrifying, but nonetheless underdetermined. I don't know what is going to happen, and I can't forget the past. I won't. I need it, I want and need to remember the body that I once was. That body has suffered grievous injury, and to believe in myself as a strong, competent, and desirable woman I built on my memories of the many moments when I felt all that. Forgetting is impossible.

Forgetting is also imperiously necessary. In order to live on I must actively forget the person I once was, and be committed to forgetting more mindfully that you probably are as you go about your daily life. I am no longer what I once was -- yet come to think of it, neither are you. All of us who live on are not what we were, but are becoming, always becoming. I have chosen, and for the immediately foreseeable future, will choose, to live as fully and passionately as I can. Every time I make that choice, I moved further from the past., and am increasingly detached from what once was. It's a taxing process.”
― Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain

“Working is hard, but not working is harder.”
― Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain

“Neurological destruction made a wilderness of my body. I was in an agony of grief. Being Maggie's friend in this time took me out of myself, and I will be forever grateful.”
― Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain

“Chronic pain and grief over loss nonetheless remain as unavoidable facts of lives shaped by catastrophic accident, chronic and progressive illness, or genetic predisposition. Despite their strategic elision in disability studies or transcendence in happy stories in the popular press about trauma overcome, bodily pain and grief persist, to be accounted for as best one can. This book is my contribution to that record. I find that Emily Dickinson is right -- in the wake of great pain, the pulse of life slows, and the interval between life-sustaining beats interminably extends. Life is suspended. In that interval, the difference between the one you once were and the one you have become must be addressed, the pain acknowledged, and the grief admitted. It can be a treacherous process, given all that might be lost.”
― Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain