What Comes After Quotes

“Evil isn’t a person,” he said. “It’s not a political group either. Or a religion like some people think. Evil is a force. Like gravity. It acts on all of us. We’re all vulnerable to it.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“The mystery of whether a life can turn on a single touch given or withheld.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“And that if I heard only silence, it was because I was not yet accustomed to silence.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“Death—having completed its task—had left his body at peace.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“I’m not sure where you’re coming up with this stuff, but here’s the deal: Every mother screws up her children one way or another. It’s up to you whether you stay that way.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“These are the facts. They reveal only that the greatest mysteries lie hidden in what we believe we already know.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“Some hearts are stronger than others. I think every heart knows when it's had enough, don't you?”
― Joanne Tompkins, What Comes After

“It didn't take long to understand that there was no recipe or equation. Parenting was a river of moment-by-moment decisions, intuitions, a balancing of one's own needs, which did factor in somehow, with those of the child. But mostly it was being there, truly there, with all your senses. Trusting the heart knowledge that arises with full attention.”
― Joanne Tompkins, What Comes After

“Sometimes I wonder what is happening to their brains, the way our devices are making us all ADD. We're like birds pecking at a feeder for the next fix of seed...”
― Joanne Tompkins, What Comes After

“I ignored the evidence before me and held him in the Light, pictured him glowing with the Divine that still existed in him. And he changed over those minutes, a falling away of the layers of not-God, not-love, of man-made cover, of an ego's false protections. Then he was weeping. Silently shaking as tears spilled onto his cheeks.

We sat until he was still. We sat awhile longer. I stood and waited a few minutes more. Then I opened my arms.

He hesitated but came to me, and I held the Divine that he still contained, and I held the man with all his lesions, and I held myself for being there, reaching out, even as the not-God in me roared with an ache to inflict grievous harm on this man, to make him feel all he had inflicted on others.

When I had given everything I could, I pulled away. I left him before the not-love in me reared up, before it suffocated that of the Divine.”
― Joanne Tompkins, What Comes After

“She wondered if this is what it meant to be a mother. To ache for a life that was not your own, to long for a child who could, without the slightest input from you, fall completely out of view.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“Parenting was a river of moment-by-moment decisions, intuitions, a balancing of one’s own needs, which did factor in somehow, with those of the child. But mostly it was being there, truly there, with all your senses. Trusting the heart knowledge that arises with full attention.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“Being listened to is much better than being noticed at the door.”
― Joanne Tompkins, What Comes After

“We didn’t know how to think of ourselves.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“When two people love each other, it shouldn't matter whether it seems strange or wrong to anyone else”
― Joanne Tompkins, What Comes After

“You can see the crimes that people commit, see them in their clear brutality, and yet someday, somehow, forgive. It might be the only way. How is forgiveness of what is not acknowledged forgiveness at all?”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“He hesitated but came to me, and I held the Divine that he still contained, and I held the man with all his lesions, and I held myself for being there, reaching out, even as the not-God in me roared with an ache to inflict grievous harm on this man, to make him feel all he had inflicted on others. When I had given everything I could, I pulled away. I left him before the not-love in me reared up, before it suffocated that of the Divine.”
― JoAnne Tompkins, What Comes After

“An error of youth, this certainty based on nothing more than gut dislike.”
― Joanne Tompkins, What Comes After