Beyond the High Blue Air Quotes

“How can it be, that Miles is dead and yet the world renews itself, quivers with fresh life.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“You can go now, my darling, you can leave us, you need stay no longer. You have stayed long enough and we will survive now. You’ve taught us how to survive.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“I’m reminded afresh of the waste, the senseless waste.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“he stayed for our sake, the ultimate protector. He has suffered enough for that decision.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“What else is there, in the end, but love?”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“Miss, such a slight, quiet word, but it says everything. He is missing and his absence permeates every moment of my life like an elusive scent that reminds me of something familiar but never present. I carry it with me day and night. Private and invisible, it sustains me.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“In love, or in grief for love lost; one segues into the other, a continuum of love.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“Being in grief, it seems, is not unlike being in love.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“I need the soft focus. We are living with horror, he and I.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“hope on its gallant charger is still carrying us all high.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“Grief is private, only to be shared by choice. Intrusion, even when well meaning, exacerbates the pain, ratcheting it up out of nowhere like suddenly knocking an already broken limb.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“Sitting there on the carpet in the playroom, surrounded by the remnants of a life lived once upon a time without any tremor of foreboding, I think: I had that. At least I had that. And then the ripple of pain begins and as I go under, I can barely breathe.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“I dread the moment of looking up and knowing that he is there, behind that window, contained and separated in every conceivable way from me, from us, from his life as he should be living it, thinking it. Longing to see him, dreading the confrontation with his reality.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“And so memory continues along its barbed, relentless course and I’m not safe after all.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“strong, decisive hands as he slips the Cure CD into the player; then, for a moment, I am lost in the joy of his company, the way our conversation covered everything that mattered, the way he could make me laugh until I ached, before the familiar blinding pain follows and I must concentrate on nothing else except holding myself together until it passes.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“In the end I suspect it is the small, routine pleasures in life that make the best building blocks for survival. The things that have to be continued with, the unavoidable humdrum facts of just living: I try to engage in those moments and make them, at least them, enjoyable.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“Optimism is to believe that things will always turn out for the best; true hope is clear-eyed, knowing the negative but desiring the positive.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“Grief, I discover, changes you. I have become different, outside and inside: outside, because I am now an object of pity and horror, no longer safe; inside, because my terrible new sensitivity has destroyed tolerance—there is no room left for it. Friendship is put to the most severe of tests.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“we are a family that has been visited by disaster, marked out, different. I could be a foul black crow. Limping with my scabbed feet, dragging a broken wing behind me, eyes glittering, my wound an open gash; I leave a trail.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“I want to understand every element of what is happening to him. I don’t want to be protected from it—why should I be? It doesn’t make me feel squeamish, nor does knowledge make the situation any more painful.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“The truth is, I don’t want to share the truth. I’m not ready yet.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“Miles’s situation has opened a door onto the relentless, unstoppable suffering of other people, every day, everywhere; I feel viscerally aware that this terrible thing that has happened to him is only one drop in a vast cauldron of human suffering.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“I am trapped in a nightmare that has continued into the morning, a ludicrous object of grief crouched in the corner, pinched and thin and angry, hollow-eyed and foul.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“He takes me in his arms and I feel stilted, different, I’m not the same as before; I am damaged.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“I think I don’t want it to be in God’s hands, look what’s already happened in God’s hands.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“Afterwards we discover that we all felt this same thing, felt the sense of spiritual power heavy in the room and that we were on the periphery of something beyond our mortal comprehension, as though Miles were absorbed in a conversation with Life and Death and we should not presume to interrupt.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“with sudden, cold precision I know that my life before this morning is no longer accessible.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air

“Fuck the moon, I think, fuck the fucking moon; and feel betrayed.”
― Lu Spinney, Beyond the High Blue Air