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Grief Is for People

Book by Sloane Crosley · 18 quotes · Grief, Loss, Humanity

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Grief Is for People Quotes

“Human beings are the only animals that experience denial. All creatures will try to survive under attack, will burrow when under siege or limp through the forest. But they recognize trouble when it hits. Not one fish, in the history of fish, having gotten its fins chewed off, needs another fish's perspective: I don't know, Tom, that looks pretty bad. Denial is humankind'a specialty, our handy aversion. We are so allergic to our own mortality; we'll do anything to make it not so. Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity. But it can't be helped.”

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“This is all my fault for not moving homes or cities, for not taking certain jobs or marrying certain men, for looking backward all the time when I should be looking forward. I dwell too much. I hold on to things I shouldn't, to people I shouldn't. If you don't change, change will find you in its most unruly form. It will press down on your vulnerabilities until they squish out the edges. Life needs volunteers or else it will start calling on people at random.”

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“Dying / Is an art, like everything else," wrote Plath, whose lifelong flirtation with death went too far one fateful February morning. And art is nothing if not subjective. In the same vein, when I think of Virginia Woolf, it is not merely as a helpless participant in the morbid fascination that has sprung up around these two writers--but of the windows of time of their deaths. The time it took Woolf to fill her pockets with rocks. The selection of those rocks. When does a suicide begin? When do we start counting? At the riverbank or in the river? In the kitchen the night before or the next morning? Rilke warned the "we must learn to die: That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific, and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape." That's nice. But it's hard to throw something like that together at the last minute. What gruesome work suicide makes of grief! Sometimes I conflate blame and action, sometimes I separate them as if in a moral centrifuge, sometimes I think it doesn't matter either way.”

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“Gradually, I start to understand why they are all so desperate to differentiate themselves and yet can't outright trash one another, why they are all so legibly diplomatic: It's because none of their authors have recovered. They want recovery and they want to be of use but if they have to pick? They'll take the recovery. Or, as a consolation prize, the catharsis. Alas, as the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg wrote, "You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing. You cannot deceive yourself by hoping for caresses and lullabies from your vocation." What you can do is be careful with other people. Human beings are solid things made out of delicate materials. Perhaps this is why we like jewelry as much as we do, because jewelry is our inverse--delicate things made out of solid materials. And it's not nice to poke too hard at someone else's open would. Having written a book on loss yourself, who would know better than you that the printed word should never be mistaken for the final word? Or that some part of you thinks that if you write the best story you can, he will hear you? Because what is the idea that something exists, even if you can't see it, if not the very definition of faith?”

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