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Quote by Douglas Kennedy

“But when you are engulfed in loss, how can you detach yourself in the transience of everything? How can I take a theoretically long view of things when every waking moment without Johannes is agony?”

Quote by Douglas Kennedy

Book:The Moment
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The Moment

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Author

Douglas Kennedy
Douglas Kennedy

Douglas Kennedy is an American novelist known for his profound psychological portrayals and complex character development. His works often explore themes of personal identity, moral dilemmas, and the complexities of modern life. Born on January 1, 1955, Kennedy's writing career began in the 1980s. more

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“Cities can do this. Cast off their onetime identity and - while wearing the same (but now reconstructed) exterior-become something new. We as individuals can also change physical shape. We can lose weight and gain muscle, or go the other way and give in to flab. We can wear clothes that speak volumes about the images we want to present to the world. We can display our wealth, our poverty, our sense of confidence, our sense of self doubt. We can, like cities, change all the externals. But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities- it's capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us-all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got, all that we got but never wanted, all that was found and lost.”

PainLossIdentitiyAcceptance Of GriefAcceptance Of Our Past
Book:The Moment
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“Thoughts at a Café Table Between the Kazan and the Iron Gates Progress has now placed the whole of this landscape underwater. A traveller sitting at my old table on the quay at Orsova would have to peer at the scenery through a thick brass-hinged disc of glass; this would frame a prospect of murk and slime [...] Moving a couple of miles downstream, he would fumble his way on to the waterlogged island and among the drowned Turkish houses; or, upstream, flounder among the weeds and rubble choking Count Széchenyi's road and peer across the dark gulf at the vestiges of Trajan on the other side; and all round him, above and below, the dark abyss would yawn and the narrows where currents once rushed and cataracts shuddered from bank to bank and echoes zigzagged along the vertiginous clefts would be sunk in diluvian since. [...] He could toil many days up these cheerless soundings, for Rumania and Yugoslavia have built one of the world's biggest ferro-concrete dams and hydro-electric power plants across the Iron Gates. This has turned a hundred and thirty miles of the Danube into a vast pond which has swollen and blurred the course of the river beyond recognition. It has abolished cayons, turned beetling crags into mild hills and ascended the beautiful Cerna valley almost to the Baths of Hercules. Many thousands of the inhabitabnts of Orşova and the riparian hamlets had to be uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. The islanders of Ada Kaleh have been moved to another islet downstream and their old home has vanished under the still surface as though it has never been. Let us hope that the power generated by the dam has spread well-being on either bank and lit up Rumanian and Yugoslav towns brighter than ever before because, in everything but economics, the damage is irreparrable. [... M]yths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of shadow. Goethe's advice, 'Bewahre Dich vor Räuber und Ritter und Gespenstergeschichten',* has been taken literally, and everything has fled. _____________ * Beware of the robber, the cavalier, and ghost stories.”

CultureNatureLossHistoryProgressDestructionVandalismHydro PowerUtilitarism
Book:Between the Woods and the Water
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“After all the jacks are in their boxes And the clowns have all gone to bed You can hear happiness staggering on down the street Footprints dressed in red And the wind whispers, "Mary" A broom is drearily sweeping Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life Somewhere, a queen is weeping Somewhere, a king has no wife And the wind, it cries, "Mary" The traffic lights, they turn blue tomorrow And shine their emptiness down on my bed The tiny island sags downstream 'Cause the life that lived is dead And the wind screams, "Mary" Will the wind ever remember The names it has blown in the past? And with this crutch, its old age and its wisdom It whispers, "No, this will be the last" And the wind cries, "Mary”

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“Grief is grey and damp, a marshland of emotions that suck you in, tendrils of mist that caress you, asphyxiate you. Grieving is the journey you do alone, a penitence, a pilgrimage, an affirmation of being alive in the face of death that shadows us, every waking moment. Grief was the country I was on a pilgrimage within, searching for redemption from my grieving.”

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Book:More Things in Heaven and Earth
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