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Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship QUOTES

Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship QUOTES

1 " Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

2 " The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu 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: A Memoir of Friendship

3 " Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

4 " I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...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: A Memoir of Friendship

5 " It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

6 " Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

7 " I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

8 " What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

9 " Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

10 " It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

11 " The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. —GEORGE ELIOT, Scenes of Clerical Life "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

12 " The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

13 " Grief is what tells you who you are alone. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

14 " Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

15 " Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

16 " I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

17 " Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part--time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

18 " The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

19 " That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

20 " Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything. "

― Gail Caldwell , Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship