Goodbye to Clocks Ticking Quotes

“My body might be ill, I granted, but the paper worlds I had visited in my life remained vast and memorable. No matter what happened to me, no matter how the months ahead would shear me, a thousand books waited to rescue me, the simple flying carpet of black print on white pages a friend as trusted as any I had ever encountered.”
― Joseph Monninger, Goodbye to Clocks Ticking: How We Live While Dying

“Love, I've always thought, is showing up. It's saying yes when no is easier.”
― Joseph Monninger, Goodbye to Clocks Ticking: How We Live While Dying

“I came across an Etruscan word, saeculum, which is a concept, or marker, of a temporal interval. Generally speaking, it is the span of time lived by the oldest person present. The day will come…when the last person to have fought in Vietnam will die. . . .Who will remember when . . . a car had to be cranked to start or when the clank of an ice delivery man carrying fifty-pound block in tongs brought merriment to the afternoon?

I wonder, then, what would be my saeculum. Or whom. I wonder what young nephew or niece’s child, siphoned through the tunnel of time, would see a faded photograph of me and search their memories for my name. I think he was some sort of great-uncle, she or he will say. I don’t remember exactly. Look at his clothes!”
― Joseph Monninger, Goodbye to Clocks Ticking: How We Live While Dying

“Dove, Cannery Row, The Godfather, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Odd Sea, The World According to Garp, Siddhartha. Thirties: Rabbit Is Rich, The Golden Notebook, In Cold Blood, Crime and Punishment, The Last Boy, The Professional, Roots, Great Heart, Tropic of Cancer, King of the World, Judgment Ridge, Islands in the Stream, The Devil’s Teeth. Forties: The Islandman, Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Right Stuff, The Last Duel, War and Peace, The Orchard, The Secret History, Of Human Bondage, A River Runs Through It, Death Comes for the Archbishop, A Moveable Feast, We Took to the Woods, Nine Mile Bridge, A Fine Balance. Fifties: Miriam at Thirty-Four, The Hair of Harold Roux, The Horsemen, Give Me My Father’s Body (reissued in a revised and updated edition as Minik), Endurance, As I Lay Dying, Snow Falling on Cedars, Emma, The Long Lavender Look, Shadow Divers, The Devil’s Candy, Moriarty, The Last Place on Earth, The Power and the Glory. Sixties: Bleak House; The Sound and the Fury; Catherine the Great; Last Train to Memphis; The”
― Joseph Monninger, Goodbye to Clocks Ticking: How We Live While Dying