“I knew from experience there isn't anything anyone can really say to help you through your grief. You just have to let the pain wash over you over and over again, until the tide of it drifts back and away, slowly and gradually.”
“Or is it the case that no one gets over anything? Is there really that much pain and suffering continuing right now at this minute, in millions of hearts, in bodies carrying on the burden of existence, trying to smile through tears for fleeting, passing moments here and there-when they can forget what happened to them, maybe even for whole hours at a time? Maybe that's what it is to live.”
“Fanatics, mystics, and extremists all tended toward irrational and unexpected action.”
“I realized I had let my own incapacity to recover from my past shrink my world so that it was big enough for only me. It was hitting me now, really for the first time, how being fucked up can turn into a form of narcissism. So that I barely acknowledged that others might need something from me.”
“I couldn't tell if this was Tracy's attempt at dark humor, or if the world truly did hold more horrors that I hadn't considered. I needed to think about that one later, I decided, and shelved it in some inner recess of my brain.”
“I would, and I will. You know my theory. Plunge in. Face the fear head-on. Stay on the offense.”
“Plunge in. Face the fear head-on.”
“So many times people get carried away by passion, do things they never thought they'd do, and their whole lives change in an instant. Sometimes people are simply insane - mentally ill - and it isn't their fault.”
“Sometimes crying or laughing are the only options left, and laughing feels better right now.”
“For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”
“It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"
I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still.
"Because, he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, - you'd forget me.”
“The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.”
“People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.”
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