Some things I underlined:
- "And no one is obliged to learn anything from loss. This is a horrible thing to say to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they're still in the fetal position." pg. 5
- "The idea that misfortune arrives "out of the blue" means that the surrounding events become consequential in order to buttress the presence of the intruding event. You looks back on the day of your car accident and remember how you broke a glass in the sink that morning. You never break glasses in the sink. What can be gleaned from this fact? To a person who does not expect trauma? Something cosmic. To a person who expects trauma. More or less nothing. " pg. 26
- "Ideations not withstanding, I find it hard to believe any suicidal person knows the exact dimensions of what they're hiding. So why would the rest of us have a superior sense? And who among us is categorically happy? Rather, who among us is categorically happy and tolerable? Who lacks a reason to kill themselves? Reasons are not the problem." pg. 46
- "We all have something we're trying to fend off. The question is, how big and with what?" pg. 47
- "Or, to quote one of Russell's favorite films, The Lion In Winter: "Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives." pg. 47
- "'I've always wanted my life to be different,' he says, 'not over'" pg. 49
- "Everyone will be sad about this for a month. Then life will return to normal. You'll see. How difficult to love someone who was so wrong and will never be right again." pg. 51
- On object permanence: "Though who knows at what age one develops a narrative arc? Probably twenty-six. More likely it's because if things didn't keep disappearing they couldn't keep coming back. The coming back is the best part" My note: Is this why I don't mourn lost things/people properly? My partially formed brain? pg. 59
- "And do you know what George Sand said? George Sand said we can not tear a single page from our ives but we can burn the whole book." pg. 60
- " 'How will he know you loved him,' she asks, "Unless you try to destroy yourself?' " pg. 64
- My note: Quiet quitting. Committing little suicides while the world moves on. pg. 69
- regarding the wealthy: "Their whole lives, they could have anything they wanted. And now what they wanted was not to have lives." pg. 70
- "It's easy to slip into suffering alone" my note: Do I want people to suffer with me? pg. 71
- "Countless burial rituals treat objects not as offerings but as gateways." pg. 86
- "With gas or pills, I think, there's space. Time for the murderer to take one shape and the victim to take another, two versions of the same person, one who conceivably did not mean it. One who might have lived, for a short while anyway, to express self-condolences before sinking into oblivion. None of us are the same person we were an hour ago." my note: Knowing someone is like hanging out with 10,000 twins, and they're all switching spots from hour to hour. [william kentridge?] Pg. 87
- "What gruesome work suicide makes of grief!" my note: is refusing treatment suicide? Is pursuing holistic treatment instead, suicide? pg. 88
- my note: black people can't/ shouldn't hang themselves. It's too historical, too metaphorical. It's too physically violent to other black people. I remember sobbing at the end of Do The Right Thing, crying "they hate us! they hate us so much." This would have a similar effect. pg. 88
- "Having located the thing and lost it again sometimes fills me with the fear that I'll never get another chance. Other times, it fills me with the confidence that I will. These feelings cancel each other out until all that's left is the brightness of screens." pg. 89
- " 'It's intolerable being tolerated.' That's from A Little Night Music." pg. 109
- "In 'Goodbye To All That," Joan Didion writes, 'It is easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends.' " pg. 117
- "Those living with grief know the particular sleepiness it engenders - so nonnegotiable, so immune to warm milk and narcotics...Grief insomnia has a mouth on it: Time does not heal all wounds, Time does not heal any wounds. Who promised you that? Get your money back. Time only pushes wounds aside. Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss. Usually, his is a good thing. So much of healing is the recognition that not all your tissue got damaged in the accident. But every so often, there is no such thing as regular life. Every so often, life crowds out loss with more loss." My note: Erasable pens are like the body. It can heal itself/ erase, but the cold/scurvy will bring it back. pg. 154
- "As the writer and theologian Thomas Merton wrote, "The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does the most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most." pg. 155
- "Perhaps this is the plainest definition of anxiety: mourning what isn't gone yet. Anxiety is an ever present stage of grief" my note: My youth. My life. pg.155
- "In The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion writes: "A single person is missing for you, and the whle world is empty." my note: how do you fill the world? pg. 159
- "An assembly of details. Is this what makes a person?" Pg. 159
- "Depression will always be a challenge to illustrate-- it's woefully plotless, a 'storm of murk' " pg. 162
- "The anxiety may have been a blanket, but the sadness was a knife." my note: my anxiety is a knife, my sadness is the blanket. pg. 168
- " You can ignore grief. You can push it around your plate. But you can't give it away." pg. 169.
- "Perhaps if I knew more about God, I would know it's blasphemous to want answers, and perhaps if I knew more about philosophy, I would know it's foolish to suggest there are answers." pg. 191
- "If I desire the kind of life you wanted me to live, one of expansion over retraction, I must pearn to be on the side of the living." pg. 191
