“Grief makes time feel soft. Like film peeled off a reel. Like maybe nothing ever happened the way you thought.”
Source: Returning My Face: A Chilling Sci-Fi Thriller Where Someone Wants to Erase You and Live the Life They Always Wanted
“I caught my reflection smiling first, and I’ve been trying to get ahead of it ever since.”
Source: Returning My Face: A Chilling Sci-Fi Thriller Where Someone Wants to Erase You and Live the Life They Always Wanted
“Her broken heart was still beating. How come? Buses were running, buzzing, humming. People were smiling.
Birds' chatter and kids' laughter rang in her ears, causing her pain. The streets with fancy boutiques, ready for the winter testival, were nonchalant to her sorrow. And the coffee shops served croissants.”
“Your father wouldn’t want this,” he said. “He wouldn’t want this for you.”
My eyes started to burn.
“If he’s gone, what does it matter?” I said hoarsely. “What does it matter what he would have wanted?”
“It will always matter,”
Source: Into This River I Drown
“It is always better to say, to do / Since a mistake can be forgiven / A wasted chance is never recovered”
Source: The Meaning Of Life Is To Fight: A Collection of Poems
“Grief is an aspect of love, a reflection of the ability to connect. As the heart can grow bigger to allow more love, it can also do so for grief. I don't want any more of my patients to die, but I know that they will. And although I don't want more grief in my life, I know that the connections that permit grief to occur are the connections that keep us -- doctors and patients -- alive.”
Source: What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
“It's the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, I hate more than anything."
Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-black window, their shadows unmoving on the wall. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a bare-handed frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild.
But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't.”
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns
“So what if the old man
on the bus is trying and
failing to remember his dead
mom’s face, as if the past were
not a cartoon tunnel scratched
on a wall?”
“i should have asked him more. i should have written it all down....i should have tried to know all of him while i had the time. before it was too late.”
Source: Great Big Beautiful Life
“People whose religions commit them to the existence of the afterlife feel the terror of death just as anyone else does, nor are they spared the wrenching pain of loss. They do not respond to their loved one's death as though the loved one has moved to a place where they can't contact them for a while but expect to later rejoin them. They might say that is how they see the situation, but their profound sorrow and their mourning practices point in a different direction.”
Source: Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life