The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World Quotes

“How could I tell her that walking brings you so intimately close to the earth that the separation between you and dirt or you and rodent becomes inconsequential? Where once you saw yourself as a sueprior being, a clean and shiny thing, you start to know yourself as a mass of decomposable flesh, moving through a landscape of decomposing things, atoms through atoms, particles coming and going.”
― Torre DeRoche, The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World: Love, Loss, and Other Catastrophes—through India, Italy, and Beyond

“Coincidentally, the psychoanalyst had explained to me through metaphor that to have anxiety is like having a snake somewhere in the room, but you don't know where that snake is. Is it under the couch? In the cupboard? hiding in a hole in the wall? Coiled up in your boot? If you knew, you could do something productive about it, like walk away, kill it, or befriend it and call it Barry - if you're into that kind of thing. But because you don't know where it is, or even if it's there at the release that follows after you've fought or fled. That nervous energy gets trapped in the body as unresolved tension. Anxiety. And so, to find the snake in the room is better than not, because then you run, kill it, or befriend it and call it Barry. That's why it's so important to face fears: to exorcize anxiety.”
― Torre DeRoche, The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World: Love, Loss, and Other Catastrophes—through India, Italy, and Beyond

“There are so many unknows in nature, and yet we've arrogantly come to see it as an insentient provider for our needs - wood and oxygen or shade on a hot summer's day, not a civilization full of its own rich and menaingful activity. How condescending. their inner worlds are far more complex and intelligent than we recognize.”
― Torre DeRoche, The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World: Love, Loss, and Other Catastrophes—through India, Italy, and Beyond

“Alchemy is the magic that emerges when we give up needing to have certainty and instead open up to the world, so that the world can open itself up to us.

Sometimes you have to break the heart of someone you love in order to live your own truth.”
― Torre DeRoche, The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World: Love, Loss, and Other Catastrophes—through India, Italy, and Beyond