I started running away when I was five years old. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized what I really wanted was somebody to come after me when I was running away.
I think the thumb print on the throat of many people is childhood trauma that goes unprocessed and unrecognized.
The world has no sympathy with any but positive griefs. It will pity you for what you lose; never for what you lack
How have I never realized before that for all the strong, kind parts of him, there are also hurting, broken parts?
The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that? Instead, she said, "I love you." She did. She loved him. But even that didn't feel like anything anymore.
I think the worst kind of grief is unacknowledged grief.
Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job.
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.
Some pass their days as though suffering a deep sadness they cannot name. Others are unhappy because life didn't turn out the way they thought it would.
True suffering does not know itself and never calculates.
How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.
Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?
