“You think you know what you can handle, and what you can't. But the truth is, almost anything is endurable. Because we're made that way, to make the best of what we have.” StrengthShort Book:Shirley Source: Shirley
“i am the pebble in your italian loafers (also the reason you can own them). i am the shadow that curves over the swollen cracked plaster in barry's ceiling, waking him in fear when the moon is bright. i am the acrid taste that flows from the kitchen taps after heavy rains. i am after you, i am part of you, i am everywhere, i love you.” LoveLongPainDeathHeartbreak Book:Shirley Source: Shirley
“we were students; you read my story in the threshold. you said to your roommate, 'this woman has something. i'm going to meet her.' you told him. 'and if she's anything like her writing, i'm going to marry her.' wasn't i? wasn't i?” LongPainHeartbreak Book:Shirley Source: Shirley
“dead, i have one thing that you do not. i never age. i curse you to wrinkles and strands of grey hair swept across the dome of your balding head. i curse you and i hate you and i will not leave you. because i love you.” LongPainDeathHeartbreak Book:Shirley Source: Shirley
“I did not cry [...] I did not think. I simply sat, and watched and waited. One road had closed, one path to resolution. I would never make it up with her, never get to apologize or tell her what she'd meant to me. I would not be her friend again. I had not conceived this possibility. Forgiveness. I hoped she had forgiven me.” LongPainDeathHeartbreakNostalgia Book:Shirley Source: Shirley
“An adventure can begin without warning, that the most minor decisions—right, left—can change lives in a moment. That friendships, even the best of them, don't always survive. Oh, and this: that so much of what happens can't ever be proved—the best we can do is write out paltry tales.” LongNostalgia Book:Shirley Source: Shirley
“At a table, in a public library, on a winter Saturday, and yet I felt as if I'd arrived home. That house in North Bennington, another winter ten years earlier, and I as young as a girl could be and yet as old as any other Mother Earth, and I had learned what it was to love. How to be loved and how to provide love, and how to be of service as a gesture to the gods. Had I known how fast it would all go, how little it would amount to, would I have lived each day more consciously? Ah, me. I don't have the faintest idea.” LongNostalgia Book:Shirley Source: Shirley