Best quotes by Gail Caldwell

The flaw is the thing we love.

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.

If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.

My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.

The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.

Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear.

I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice.

The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of intention and his sovereignly affecting prose.... With his elliptical evocation of Mrs. Dalloway, he has managed to pay great but quiet tribute -- reminding us of the gorgeous, ferocious beauty of what endures.

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

the mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her.

the territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace.

It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything.

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.

Grief is what tells you who you are alone.

You can’t change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn’t make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don’t get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world off-kilter? It’s like leaving the train at the wrong stop: You are still you, but in a new place, there by accident or grace, and you will need your wits about you to proceed.

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.