How Lucky Quotes

“I am blessed. I am blessed because I am going to go long before any of them do. I am not going to have to grieve for them, because they are going to have to grieve for me.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“... I have changed this world. I have found my place. The world is different because I was in it. This is what we should all want.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“You look at me like I have something to be sad about. My existence makes you grateful you are not me.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“I am still inside here, with my own thoughts, and my own worries, and my own obsessions, and my own rage.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“It was all in the wake of that realization that life is pain, that everything you love can and will be taken away from you, that the only way to keep going is to accept that that big black grief is going to fester there in your stomach forever - that it's never going to get better"
This is what made me realize that I am lucky.
...
I know that this is selfish, this solace in the fact that my loved ones will miss me and thus have to experience pain that I never will.
...
I get to go first . I get to leave before grief ever becomes the house guest that never leaves.


how lucky, not having to live with the ache of saying goodbye.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“I have brought light into this world, and I have been given light from this world. And what light it is! I can say that I have lived. Can you say that you have lived? You must be able to say that you have lived. I have loved, and I have been loved. That is all we should want This is all you have to do right now. It's right in front of you.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“One of the many annoying things about being disabled is the obligation I always feel to make you feel better about your reactions to me.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“I have the certainty that I took part in this life. I was an active participant. I did not just sit at my computer and let it all pass me by. I have people who love me. I have people who will be with me until the absolute end. I have the warmth of knowing that when I am gone, no matter when that is, the people near me will speak of me and remember me and keep me in their souls for the rest of their lives. I have helped people, and I have people who have helped me. Letting someone help you is the nicest thing you can do for anyone.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“You don’t owe anyone anything. They help you because they love you. Why else does anyone help anyone? Letting someone help you is the nicest thing you can do for anyone.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“I have people who love me. I have people who will be with me until the absolute end. I have the warmth of knowing that when I am gone, no matter when that is, the people near me will speak of me and remember me and keep me in their souls for the rest of their lives. I have helped people, and I have people who have helped me. Letting someone help you is the nicest thing you can do for anyone.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“This is one of Travis’s greatest gifts: the ability to make all unpleasantness and worry disappear simply by not paying attention. He’s like a goldfish with a head injury.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“This ends up being less sloppy than you might think. Athens doesn’t have the fake regality on football weekends that, say, Oxford, Mississippi, has—that place looks like the party from Get Out on football Saturdays; everybody’s got bow ties and straw hats—but we don’t set fire to the world just to watch it burn like the lunatics at LSU either.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“You will hopefully forgive me if you're a patron of Spectrum Air expecting a certain level of service today, but you see, I'm corresponding with a guy who may have murdered a young woman, and I am waiting for him to write me back. Forgive me if I have little patience for the fact that your seat does not recline.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“You can be incredibly cautious (what if right now is when it happens?) and stupidly reckless (what if tomorrow is when it happens?).”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“Take it from someone using the chair: people who do not use chairs do not like to talk about the chair. They are so worried about saying the wrong thing that they either don't say anything at all or, more likely . . . they say the wrong thing. But that's OK too! I like talking about the chair! I like it when people ask me how I'm feeling. I like it when people remember there's a person in here.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky: A Novel

“did. They had class at the same time in the”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“Take it from someone using the chair: people who do not use chairs do not like to talk about the chair. They are so worried about saying the wrong thing that they either don’t say anything at all or, more likely . . . they say the wrong thing. But that’s OK too! I like talking about the chair! I like it when people ask me how I’m feeling. I like it when people remember there’s a person in here. I get it. I know it’s strange for some of you to see someone in a wheelchair, someone who can’t move any of his extremities, someone who doesn’t seem to have control of any element of his body, right there in front of you. You’re not used to it, and you don’t know what to do. It takes a second just to take in what you’re looking at, to comprehend what a human body can be put through, and then it takes another second to process all the emotions you’re feeling, the sadness, the sympathy, oh, that sympathy, you poor thing, what kind of world do we live in when this could happen to a child, an innocent child, oh the inhumanity of it all, why is there suffering anyway? One learns pretty quick—when one’s whole life has been spent watching people try not to stare and still stare and then feel guilty about staring and then look away and act like it’s totally cool—how to catch those flashes of human emotion flickering across a new person’s face. It happens to every one of you, and, seriously, it’s OK. Well, it’s not OK, but I am used to it by now and have learned not to judge you. You don’t even realize you’ve done it until you’ve already done it. I get it: I can be a lot to process. You just want to walk down the street, maybe grab a beer and catch the end of the Falcons game, and then wham, you’re contemplating how unbearably cruel life on this planet can be and wondering how any sort of kind and caring God could possibly allow a person to suffer so profoundly. As I said: I get”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“Grief, Mom discovered, was not a problem you could fix, a loose screw you could tighten, a math problem you could solve, a child whose pain you could comfort. It just sat there in your stomach and didn’t move. Sometimes it grew, sometimes it shrank, but it was always, always there. That was the hardest part, she said, harder than anything else, before or after. The grief doesn’t leave. It becomes a part of you. Either you learn to live with it or you die.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“You don’t really know anything about yourself until you’ve been forced to deal with pain, real pain.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“Marjani has never had a sip of alcohol in her life, but she stinks of beer like a Supreme Court justice in college when she comes back to check on me Saturday nights.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“I’m a guy with a disease that eventually kills everybody who has it, and eventually it’s going to kill me. I am glad it wasn’t today. I hope it’s not for a long, long time. But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s going to happen, and when it happens, I don’t want Marjani or Travis or my mom or this Jennifer person who is suddenly the matriarch of this weird little family to be kicking themselves up and down over it.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“There’s a reason there aren’t any fifty-five-year-old terrorists, or at least there weren’t until they all started watching Fox News. Destroying things is for the young.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“It is easier to bring up death when it’s not in the same area code as you are, and it wasn’t back then. It is probably worth noting that nobody has mentioned it to me in the last couple of years.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“Today was scary. But they’re all scary. We can’t fret around the planet waiting for something to kill us, or worried something’s going to kill someone we love. I’m not going to stare off into the void waiting for it all to end.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“You gotta give yourself oxygen before you can give it to anyone else. I have to put my own mask on first.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“I think of the internet like my disguise. It's the only place where people don't treat me like I'm either a monster or a charity case to be pitied.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“What a strange instrument a tuba is. I wonder how many different shapes they twisted that metal into until they realized that a tuba's shape was the exact one they needed to make that exact sound.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“People are always surprised my speaker doesn't sound like Stephen Hawking. It's a pleasant, vaguely British man's voice. A little like a mechanical, stilted Colin Firth.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“People are kind to one another in the real world, even if it's a meaningless kindness. It goes unremarked upon. But it shouldn't. We are always much angrier on our phones than we are in the real world.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky

“My whole life up to this point, I've never lost anyone. Not Mom. Not Travis. Not Kim, really. Not Marjani. And I am blessed. I am blessed because I am going to go long before any of them do. I am not going to have to grieve for them, because they are going to grieve for me.

I know that this is selfish, this solace in the fact that my loved ones will miss me and thus have to experience pain that I never will. But I cannot deny that it is true.

I am the lucky one in this regard. I get to go first. I get to leave before grief ever becomes the house guest that never leaves. I get to prance around this world, how lucky, not having to live with the ache of saying goodbye. That's for them. I'm sad for them that they'll grieve when I die. But I'm glad I won't. I'm lucky. I'm lucky I'll leave before the grief gets here. I'm lucky to get to go alone. I'm lucky, I'm lucky, I'm so lucky.”
― Will Leitch, How Lucky