Because quotes are good to think and we are all about mental musings and philosophical peregrinations here.
“‘Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in the modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.'” –Natsume Soseki, Kokoro, by way of Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club, 200
Naikan is a Japanese philosophy developed by Ishin Yoshimoto. “Naikan reminds people to be grateful for everything. If you are sitting in a chair, you need to realize that someone made that chair, and someone sold it and someone delivered it — and you are the beneficiary of all that. Just because they didn’t do it especially for you doesn’t mean you aren’t blessed to be using it and enjoying it. The idea is that if you practice the Naikan part of Constructive Living, life becomes a series of small miracles, and you may start to notice everything that goes right in a typical life and not the few things that go wrong.” –Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club, 211-212
“‘We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it’s not owing like a debt to one person — it’s really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant — so each person who keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it. Just by giving friendship and love you keep the people around you from giving up — and each expression of friendship or love may be the one that makes all the difference.'” — Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club, 212
“The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention.” –Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club, 192
“Grief is what tells you who you are alone.” –Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, 3
“The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence and linear expectations, where I thought grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that gradually receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.” — Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, 150
“Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.” –Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, 163
“Clementine’s favorite denning spot in the backyard was under an enormous yew, a shrub so overgrown that a wild rosebush next to it has wound its way through and above the yew’s branches. In spring, from the second-floor porch, it looks as if the yew has borne white blossoms — a magical hybrid of thorns and flowers and evergreens. Parlor tricks or God, I know now there are visions like this everywhere. Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days. The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end.” — Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, 180
“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. Sometimes I think that the pain is what yields the solution. Grief and memory create their own narrative: This is the shining truth at the heart of Freud and Neruda and every war story ever told. The death mandates and gives rise to the story for the same reason the ancient tribes used to bury flowers with their dead. We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.” — Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, 182
“The old Navajo weavers used to insert an unmatched thread into each of their rugs, a contrasting color that runs to the outside edge. You can spot an authentic rug by this intentional flow, which is called a spirit line, meant to release the energy trapped inside the rug and pave the way for the next creation.
Every story in life worth holding on to has to have a spirit line. You can call this hope or tomorrow or the ‘and then’ of narrative itself, but without it — without that bright, dissonant fact of the unknown, of what we cannot control — consciousness and everything with it would tumble inward and implode. The universe insists that what is fixed is also finite.” –Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, 184