How To Be Loved Quotes

“Part of building a bridge meant believing that everyone was suffering at capacity and experiencing joy at capacity.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“At the time, I'd been so overwhelmed by not knowing what to say that I hadn't said anything at all. We all carried grief with us. We all carried the unknown.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“Her death was not narratively necessary; it did not and will not teach me anything. It was her life that had.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“I'm going to miss you," she said. "I really am."

I let myself finally cry, the way I'd wanted to when I'd first found out she was dying. Instead of trying to be strong for her, I took all the permission she'd ever given me not to be brave, and I looked at her, past the face that had been rearranged from chemo, past the baldness, past the hospital bed.

"I love you so much," I said.

"I know, I know, I know," she said. "I love you too. I'm so sad. I'm so sorry.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“In all of the literature about friendship, in all of the advice columns and podcasts and essays and posts about how to be a good friend, I rarely come across its most fundamental point, the one that I learned during these years, over and over again. That friendship, true friendship, is often just about two (or more) people who love each other.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“There was a part of me that was storing this up, trying to make a movie of my memories, and for what? I was trying to sear this vision into my memory because I thought this might be the last time I'd ever see it.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“It seems shocking now, utterly, that I could have become inured to her suffering, to a beloved's nearness to death. I think now about all the days I should have listened to her more. All the minutes I was distracted. All the times I forgot that she wasn't always going to be here.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“If I didn't know how to fix it, I didn't want to be with it. It had never occurred to me to go deeper into pain instead of immediately trying to pull someone out. To sit in the darkness, in the vast landscape that is the abyss of pain and fear and suffering that illness, or tragedy, brings.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“I'm so grateful for you, you know?”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“How should we live? And the room smelled, of laundry, which she did every day, but also of a faint but bright acidity, a smell I categorized as belonging to her specifically until I smelled it again, years later, in an oncology suite bathroom, and almost fell to the floor from recognition and grief.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“I had so much to learn about medicine and doctors and cytotoxic drugs and steroids and metastasis and love.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship

“Because the way she had seen my humanity, and the way she had accepted it, was loosening that tightness in my chest, uncoiling it, but too quickly. I wasn't ready for that yet. And besides, she'd lived this long, of course she'd keep surviving; I had all the time in the world with her.”
― Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship