digital commonplace book

...regrets were a waste of time. If only was the bend in a troubling road.

She could feel strength growing in her, gathering like sunlight in the distance, beginning to warm her.

After so many years of loneliness and grief, Henry brought sunlight into her life. And she was afraid to go back to the dark.

War was full of goodbyes, and most of them never really happened; you were always too early or too late.

Words were creators of worlds; you had to be careful with them.

I know what it means to lie down with despair, to sink with it.

If she must bear it, the least I can do is bear witness.

...and then all I can do is breathe, my grief-shattered muscles useless, able only to trip along.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

‘We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’

Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’

‘I wasn’t lying. I asked you what your cat’s name was. I never said I didn’t know what your cat’s name was. Do you understand the difference? I just wanted you to say his name, so that you would feel something.’

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

Laughter can sometimes feel impossible when you have so much hurt to remember.

But I refuse to allow the wounds of the recent unpleasantness to undo goodness that always was. I never knew her before, not fully, but I know her now—including the parts she was once too fearful to reveal and the parts I was so often too frightened to see. I now understand that to comprehend the immensity of someone’s pain is to comprehend the full breadth of the soul. The beauty of my wife is more beautiful to me than I ever could have imagined, because I see the fullness of her now, and I can admit, without reserve, that she is definitely one of my favorite people, perhaps even among my top five. How can I not love this woman, for how deeply she has allowed herself to be seen?

This is the joke and the surprise of marriage. You promise the impossible and then have the audacity to attempt it.

It was the undeniable truth that I was running as fast as I could down a path of death, with darkness at its end.