Bill Clegg Quotes & Sayings

OK, I say again, not really understanding what it is I am agreeing to, what it is precisely I am accepting. But I am accepting something. The truth of my circumstances? The reality I have until now avoided? It's much worse than I imagined and also somehow better. — Bill Clegg

And if the only thing you can do is show up, do it. Then do it again. And when it's the last thing you want to do and the last place you want to go, go. Just go. You have no idea who you might be helping just by sitting there or who might help you. — Bill Clegg

Judgement is often no more than a confession of ignorance. — Bill Clegg

If you want to lose sleep at night and eliminate all your free time or freedom, by all means open a small business, especially one that serves food. — Bill Clegg

Some trees love an ax, a drunk old-timer mumbled one night at the Tap, back when she still went there, and something in what he said rang true, but when she later remembered what he'd said, she disagreed and though instead that the tree gets used to the ax, which has nothing to do with love. It settles into being chipped away at, bit by bit, blade by blade, until it doesn't feel anything anymore, and then, because nothing else can happen, what's left crumbles to dust. — Bill Clegg

It's funny to think that the wind has a shape but it does. It becomes visible every once in a while - in rain being driven to the ground in sheets, or in the snow on the fields behind our house. I remember looking out the window of my room in the winter, watching the wind blow on the surface of the white fields, lifting and whipping the snow into spirals, and in a flash you could see the force that was always there come to life and reveal itself. I think it is this way with children and parents. They are always there and then suddenly through some shock or disappointment or great gesture or obscene the child sees this person who was there all the while - invisible to them beyond their function to provide. — Bill Clegg

There are no words precise enough to describe how wide and empty the world is when you lose someone that matters to you as much as Penny did to me. — Bill Clegg

And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. — Bill Clegg

For a while the world will appear more as it is and less as I make it, and I will have a new courage to face the remaining wreckage of the past. — Bill Clegg

All we can do is play our parts and keep each other company. — Bill Clegg

Some people, she decided, magically surface in these horrible moments knowing exactly what to do, which spaces to fill. — Bill Clegg

This is a half-life, a split purgatory where her body and mind coexist but occupy separate realities. — Bill Clegg

This is the pivot between youth and age, the
thrilling place where everything seems visible, feels possible, where plans are made. On the one side you have childhood and adolescence, which are the murky ascent, and, on the other, you have the decline that is adulthood, old age, the inch-by-inch reckoning of that grand, brief vision with earthbound reality. — Bill Clegg

Wounds can sing a beguiling song. — Bill Clegg

When you see someone every day for a while, you settle into a rhythm and you come to count on them even if for nothing more than the fifteen minutes each morning they spend sitting at your counter, on one of your stools, talking about the weather and giving you a big smile and thumbs-up when they sink their teeth into a poppy-seed muffin. — Bill Clegg

[W]e've learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it. — Bill Clegg

Who had been fighting with someone they loved?
Going at it long enough to unleash the irretrievable words they knew to say only because they had been trusted to know what would hurt the most. — Bill Clegg

I've never been one to go to church, but I've al was ways believed in a creative intelligence behind the ongoing riddle of the world. — Bill Clegg

And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here. Sand will blow across Pacific Avenue and against the windows of the Moonstone, and new people will arrive and walk down the beach to the great ocean. They will be in love, or they will be lost, and they will have no words. And the waves will sound to them as they did to us the first time we heard them. — Bill Clegg

The world's magic sneaks up on you in secret, settles next to you when you have your head turned. — Bill Clegg

I knew I didn't want to be alone anymore. — Bill Clegg

Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it's to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to help him clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don't think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business. — Bill Clegg

And the stories will change and the canoe will become a headboard and the family will be mermaids and the rooms will be mansions. And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here. — Bill Clegg

I never felt so small, so humbled, by the vastness of the universe and the fragility of life. — Bill Clegg

Why is it only later that things begin to make sense? — Bill Clegg

[A]s a parent you just have no idea what anything means. On some level everything your kids do and say is in code. — Bill Clegg