Gifts

To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.

The habit of silence is lead on the tongue.

...talk is an art and a pleasure, not a matter of mere use and need.

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

A bully doesn’t answer you; he may hear but pays no heed; he talks on as if you were of no account, and it gives him the advantage always at the start, though not always

With eye and hand and breath and will.

... privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.

It's a queer business, making oneself blind.

The language lifted up my heart whenever I read it, and as I spoke it, it possessed me, it sang through me. When I ended, I heard for the first time in my life that silence which is the performer's sweetest reward.

So the year went on, a dark year, though now each day had that one bright hour at its dawn.

we ask a horse to do things which the horse would by nature rather not do; and a horse doesn’t submit its will to ours the way a dog does, being a herd animal not a pack animal, and preferring consensus to hierarchy. The dog accepts; the horse agrees.

there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

But if power is shown, a gift must be offered.

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can’t understand that they end in him, but they don’t end with him.

Her mind moved unpredictably; she saw as the mice saw, as the cat saw, as my mother saw, all at once. Her world was unfathomably complex. She did not defend her opinions, because she held conflicting opinions on almost everything. And yet she was immovable.

Înțelegerea faptuli că viața ta este o poveste, chiar în vreme ce o trăiești, te poate ajuta să o trăiești bine. Este totuși lipsit de înțelepciune să crezi ca știi cum se va desfășura sau cum se va sfărși. Acestea vor fi cunoscute doar dupa terminarea vieții.

Then they will know that you are the gift of the gift.

When you stand at the edge of the desert, you think it can be broad. You think that crossing it can take a month at most. But two months pass, and three, and four, and every day means a step further in the dust.

What they feared was what they didn't know, what they clung to was what they knew.