Sorrow and Bliss Quotes

“Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It's only the ratios that change. usually on their own.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved. I have felt alone but I have never been alone and I've been forgiven for the unforgiveable things I have done.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“I'm the worst person in the world"
"No, you're not." Patrick's hand came down in a fist and he hit the arm of the sofa. "You're not the best person in the world either, which is what you really think. You're the same as everybody else. But that's harder for you, isn't it. You'd rather be one or the other. The idea that you might be ordinary is unbearable.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Martha,” he said afterwards, lying next to me. “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.” That is what life was, and how it continued for three years after that. The ratios changing on their own, broken, completely fine, a holiday, a leaking pipe, new sheets, happy birthday, a technician between nine and three, a bird flew into the window, I want to die, please, I can’t breathe, I think it’s a lunch thing, I love you, I can’t do this anymore, both of us thinking it would be like that forever.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Normal people say, I can’t imagine feeling so bad I’d genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn’t that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling a tiredness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Nostalgia is the suffering cause by our unappeased earing to return' Whether or not, he said, the home we long for ever existed.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Ideally, Martha, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“It is hard to look into someone's eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“First novels are autobiography and wish fulfilment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“things do happen. Terrible things. The only thing any of us get to do is decide whether they happen to us or if, at least in part, they happen for us.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“I am not saying you haven't suffered, Martha. But I am saying, grow up. You're not the only one.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gest to choose is the backdrop”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“But the thing about labels is, they’re very useful when they’re right because,’ I carried on through her attempt at interruption, ‘because then you don’t give yourself wrong ones, like difficult or insane, or psychotic or a bad wife.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“And I wonder, is there any way you could come to see that what you’ve been through is for something? Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else?”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“We hugged each other like two people who had no practical experience of embracing, had only taught themselves the theory from a poorly worded manual.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“No marriage makes sense. Especially not to the outside world. A marriage is its own world.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is vastly better than crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“It used to be a joke between us, that in everything I swing between extremes and he lives his entire life on the middle setting.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“I am not being whimsical, Martha. Short another, beauty is a reason to live.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Everything is redeemable, Martha. Even decisions that end up with you unconscious and bleeding in a pedestrian underpass, like me. Although ideally, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“At night I read until I feel asleep and wherever I was, every time somebody in a book wanted something, I wrote down what it was. Once I had finished them all, I had so many torn-off bits of paper, collected in a jar on Ingrid's dressed. But they all said, a person, a family, a home, money, to not be alone. That is all anybody wants.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“I was the victim, and victims of course are allowed to behave however they like.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“As a child, watching the news or listening to it on the radio with my father I thought, when they said ‘the body was discovered by a man walking his dog’, that it was always the same man. I still imagine him, putting his walking shoes on at the door, finding the leash, the familiar dread as he clips it onto the dog’s collar, but still setting out, regardless, in the hope that, today, there won’t be a body. But twenty minutes later, God, there it is.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else? Is it why you are the love of your sister’s life? Why you’ll be a writer of much more, one day, than a small supermarket column? How you can be my fiercest bloody critic, and someone with so much compassion she’ll buy glasses she doesn’t need because the man fell off his stool. Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire? And you have been loved for all your adult life by one man. That is a gift not many people get, and his stubborn, persistent love isn’t in spite of you and your pain. It is because of who you are, which is, in part, a product of your pain. You do not have to believe me about that but I know—I do know, Martha—that your pain has made you brave enough to carry on. If you want to, you can put all of this right. Start with your sister.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Short of another, beauty is a reason to live.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Martha, why did you label every single box Miscellaneous?”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“The great revelation perhaps never did come, instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.' He finishes. Isn't that brilliant girls? It's -”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Two things that when you put them together in a poem make the reader feel whatever emotion you want them to so you don’t have to expressly name it. As in, if you write slag heap it saves you the job of typing morbid existential despair.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss