Home > Work > Hannah Coulter

Hannah Coulter QUOTES

Hannah Coulter QUOTES

1 " Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it. Love, after all, 'hopeth all things.' But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

2 " Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time? "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

3 " Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

4 " I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my very own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

5 " Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, 'Thy will be done,' and then again I am free and can go to sleep. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

6 " In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

7 " I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force that has not power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

8 " And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

9 " And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are.

And so I have to say that another of the golden threads is gratitude.

I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

10 " Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

11 " I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had flowed to me. It emptied me. As the baby fed, I seemed slowly to grow empty of myself, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

12 " I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

13 " I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn't want to be going someplace all the time for the sake of a hopeless hope. He wanted to die as himself out of his life. He didn't want his death to be the end of a technological process. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

14 " You think winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

15 " Time doesn't stop. Your life doesn't stop and wait until you get ready to start living it. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

16 " All women is brothers,' Burley Coulter used to say, and then look at you with a dead sober look as if he didn't know why you thought that was funny. But, as usual, he was telling the truth. Or part of it. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

17 " To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don’t have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

18 " You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

19 " Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter

20 " You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can't remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. YOu have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive. "

― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter