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Listening at the Gate

Book by Betsy James · 13 quotes · Fear, Love, Death

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All Fear Love Death Pain Sadness Grief Sorrow Acceptance Anger Babies Cold Courage Damage Depression Empty Frozen Growth Holy Hope Insanity

Listening at the Gate Quotes

“A huge impatience overcame me. Maybe it was impatience to find out what death was like, since life had been so different than anybody said.”

Life Death Fear Courage

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“I shoved my feet under the sheets and against her thigh until she fell off the bed onto the floor. That was another thing she had taught me: that when you love someone, you must jokingly mistreat them, just a little. It makes it easier when you leave them, or they die.”

Love Pain Sisters Siblings

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“The line of his cheek bunched in a smile. My heart made a little lurch toward him. But if I let it move, it would spill its cargo into the sea of pain, so I held it still again, tight and cold.”

Love Pain Relationships Sadness

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“From cold or horror I could not speak. The sodden blanket was heavy, the coldness in my heart flowed out and turned the whole world cold—there was no warm place. The thoughts I had frozen in order not to feel them grew monstrous, freezing everything else.”

Mind Fear Sadness Survival Frozen

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“But behind Nall’s abandoned face he was sinking, as if he held a stone that he would not let go of though it dragged him under.”

Fear Sadness Sorrow Depression

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“No. Silence is something. This is nothing. Why couldn’t I hear it before? I think it has been there always. From the beginning of time.’ He put out his hand and stubbed it on my arm, stared at it. ‘At the end of the world, at the beginning of the world; under the sea and over the sky; at the root and crown of the universe: nothing. At all. That’s what I heard. What I hear.’ He leaned forward. ‘Do you understand?”

Empty Zen Zero Nothing

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“Another face shone through his man’s face, like a stone through running water.”

Love Pain Fear Cold Anger Stillness

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“He gazed at me, grave and straight. With a shock I realized he was perfectly sane. He had just fallen through, all at once, into a deeper layer of himself—as if he had crashed through rotten floorboards into the basement.”

Growth Insanity Sanity

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“Because I was too afraid, I walked to the corpse and looked at it. It was bad. Then not so bad—a man turning into bone.”

Death Fear Grief Acceptance Sorrow

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“All deaths seem terrible to the one who dies.”

Death Hope Grief Recovery Mourning

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“The real thing was how I felt: like a root groping in darkness for water it knows is there, that it must have. Nall was that water.”

Love Nature Longing Separation Need Soulmates

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“Every holy passage leaves a scar.”

Holy Damage Survivor Rite Of Passage

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“I heard she married some hunter, well, they all marry hunters, so did I, ha! You’re just as foolish I expect, young girls are, some lad catches your eye and there’s your whole life gone, snap, a lap full of babies and grandbabies and it’s all over, you’re an old woman knitting at the hearth and that’s it, that’s it!’ I could not wait to get out of there. She shrank my whole life to the size of a poppy seed, and ate it.”

Love Marriage Babies Selfhood

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Source: Listening at the Gate