The Gap of Time

And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman's fortune or one man's loss. And we can't know the lives of others. And we can't know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside the clocks. It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.

The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.

And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?

She looked at me. There was a second the kind that holds the whole world ...

The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.

Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that it's night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What’s the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.

You were loved then and you are loved now. Isn’t that enough?

The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”’ That’s from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know.

What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

Getting older happens suddenly. It's like swimming out to sea and realising that the shore you're making for isn't the shore where you started out.

Isn't there always a history to the story? You think you're living in the present, but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

I guess I'm afraid of not being like other people. No, that's not true. I'm not afraid of not being like other people. I'm afraid I won't find anybody who doesn't mind me not being like other people. I'm not ambitious for money or power. I want to find some real way to live.

Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.

He doesn't take a photo or a video because he wants to remember — by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can't capture.

Neither parent spoke. Milo stood between them like a lighthouse between the rocks and the shipwreck.

Maybe then I will remember that, although history repeats itself and we always fall, and I am a carrier of history whose brief excursion into time leaves no mark, I have known something worth knowing, wild and unlikely and against every rote.

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.

She had been a career woman all her life. She noted there was no such thing as a career man. She had made her choices. No regrets. But there were losses. There always were.

I walked round the block thinking I’d think about it, but my legs were heading home, and sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do.

I've thought of killing myself many times. I don't do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What's my life? I make money and I make memories. That's not a life. I don't kill myself because living is my own life sentence.

She wanted to kiss the hesitation of his throat.

...and what is memory but a rope slung across time?

Our habits and our fears make our choices. We are an algorithm of ourselves--if you liked that you may also like this.

Free will depends on being stronger than the moment that traps you.

But no work, no home, no health care, no hope--that's the everyday life of millions, billions of people. To me, that's the threat. And climate change is the threat. And war, and drought and famine..." "OK, so we need security. A secure future." "No! We need to be free from corporate control that runs the world for the few and ruins it for the rest of us.

I tried not to marry you because neither of us have a happy-ever-after story written inside us.