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"Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did."
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Exlpore more Grief quotes
"From a medical standpoint, the third and the most probable explanation is that Jesus was indeed dead, and what his disciples experienced were mere hallucinations evoked by the grief over the loss of their beloved teacher. It is clinically known as "Post-Bereavement Hallucinations Experiences or PBHE."
"There are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion."
"The inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him,and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died."
"Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?"
"You will never accept gratitude as a solution to your problems, until you have reached the last stage of grief--acceptance."
"To Tiffany's surprise, Nanny Ogg was weeping gently. Nanny took another swig from her flagon and wiped her eyes. 'Cryin' helps sometimes,' she said. 'No shame in tears for them as you've loved. Sometimes I remember one of my husbands and shed a tear or two. The memories're there to be treasured, and it's no good to get morbid-like about it."
"I was an infant when my parents died.Thye both were ornithologists. I've triedSo often to evoke them that todayI have a thousand parents. Sadly theyDissolve in their own virtues and recede,But certain words, chance words I hear or read,Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,And "cancer of the pancreas" to her."
"Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness."
"My aunt just stood there, and in that second it was as though the world and the future collapsed down into a single point, and I understood that this-the kitchen, the spotless cream linoleum floors, the glaring lights, and the vivid green mass of Jell-O on the counter-was all that was left now that my mother was gone.Suddenly I couldn't stay there. I couldn't stand the sight of my aunt's kitchen, which I now understood would be my kitchen. I couldn't stand the Jell-O. My mother hated Jell-O. An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm.I ran."
Explore more quotes by Italo Calvino
"How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes...who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know."
"What he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."
"The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss."
"If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness."
"But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. 'I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?"
"The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins."
"Don't you ever get tired of reading?' she asked. 'You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?' she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening."
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