Thomas H. Cook Quotes

I know he did horrible things in the jungle. Things no amount of alcohol or pills could erase. War stains soldiers, all the way through their psyches, into their souls. I understand that, and could almost forgive him for taking his own life, to quiet the ghosts. But I can never forgive him for taking my mother with him.

I’m packed with broken glass and memories and it all hurts.

There's periods now in our New York residence when I hear the door opening, especially the first couple of years... Anytime I hear that door opening I still think I'm gonna hear her.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.

I remember the day my mother died, and it's still hard to talk about it. I just blocked it out.

I lost my brother when he was 30, and that was devastating for me. I don't know if I will ever get over it.

My mom died when I was 8.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

There are moments when the grief comes bubbling up. The first time I saw Chris's chair empty, that was really hard. And it was hard when I started folding up some of his sweaters that I so imagine him wearing.

Going back to 2012, it was a bad year for me. I lost my dad as well, so burying him a week before I went to jail, just having all of that emotion, it just hit me hard.

When I held in my hands the remains of Gunther, I had a strong feeling, like a phantom pain of an amputee.

Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

Memory is the only friend of grief.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

He didn't want to remember anymore. remembering only hurt him... everytime.

I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I-he-none of us-would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she'd built a world out of them she knew how to survive on even if no one else could.

The pain was so deep and so raw. There were days I would have died just to forget. The problem was, I couldn't figure out how to get her out of my mind. How do you kill that kind of pain?

Remembering is only a new form of suffering.

People always remember the worst day of their lifes. It becomes a part of them forever.

When the wound/ No longer hurts/ The scar does.

In visions of the night, like dropping rain, Descend the many memories of pain.

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior.