Gail Caldwell Quotes & Sayings

Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part
time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection. — Gail Caldwell

The other thing I know now, is that we survive grief merely and surely by outlasting it. The ongoing fact of the narrative eclipses the heartbreak within. A deal that seems to be the price we pay for getting to hold on to our beloved dead. — Gail Caldwell

In all the years i had blundered along in search of my own footing, she had never given me an inkling of this wish. unburdened by the demands of history or anyone else's dreams, i had wandered toward and finally reached a world far outside the plains i loved and loathed. my mother had neither begrudged me this journey nor expected it, certain that i had to make my own way. but she packed my toolbox with her great wit and forbearance before i went, and she stashed there, for long safekeeping, her desire. — Gail Caldwell

From the first winter afternoon in the Harvard ball fields, "Oh no
I need you" had become an admission and a clarion call
the tenet of dependency that forms the weft of friendship. We needed each other so that we could count the endless days of forests and flat water, but the real need was soldered by the sadder, harder moments
discord or helplessness or fear
that we dared to expose to each other. It took me years to grasp that this grit and discomfort in any relationship are an indicator of closeness, not it's opposite. — Gail Caldwell

The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty. — Gail Caldwell

The territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace. — Gail Caldwell

The rest of the family tree had a root system soggy with alcohol ... One aunt had fallen asleep with her face in the mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner; another's fondness for Coors was so unwavering that I can still remember the musky smell of the beer and the coldness of the cans. Most of the men drank the way all Texas men drank, or so I believed, which meant that they were tough guys who could hold their liquor until they couldn't anymore
a capacity that often led to some cloudy version of doom, be it financial ruin or suicide or the lesser betrayal of simple estrangement. Both social drinkers, my parents had eluded these tragic endings; in the postwar Texas of suburbs and cocktails, their drinking was routine but undramatic. — Gail Caldwell

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they're sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you're poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected. — Gail Caldwell

All of this seems as though it were yesterday, or forever ago, in that crevasse between space and time that stays fixed in the imagination. I remember it all because I remember it all. In crisis with someone you love, the dialogue is as burnished as a scar on a tree. — Gail Caldwell

Memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain. — Gail Caldwell

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world off-kilter? It's like leaving the train at the wrong stop: You are still you, but in a new place, there by accident or grace, and you will need your wits about you to proceed. — Gail Caldwell

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days. — Gail Caldwell

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part. — Gail Caldwell

Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages. — Gail Caldwell

We found out that day, fairly quickly, how great and complex our fondness was for each other; I also had my first sense of something central about Caroline that would become a pillar of our friendship. When she was confronted with any emotional difficulty, however slight or major, her response as to approach rather than to flee. There she would stay until the matter was resolved, and the emotional aftermath was free of any hangover or recrimination. My instincts toward resolution were similar: I knew that silence and distance were far more pernicious than head-on engagement. This compatibility helped to ensure that there was no unclaimed baggage between us in the years to come. — Gail Caldwell

It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too. — Gail Caldwell

Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear ... — Gail Caldwell

The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing. — Gail Caldwell

We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy. — Gail Caldwell

Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else. — Gail Caldwell

You can't change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn't make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don't get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable. — Gail Caldwell

The real trick is to let life, with all it's ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring then it's end. — Gail Caldwell

The world as we see it is only the published version. The subterranean realms, whether churches or hospital rooms or smoke-filled basements, are part of what hold up the rest. — Gail Caldwell

Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn't stand to lose. — Gail Caldwell

Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything. — Gail Caldwell

My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window. — Gail Caldwell

The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of intention and his sovereignly affecting prose ... With his elliptical evocation of Mrs. Dalloway, he has managed to pay great but quiet tribute
reminding us of the gorgeous, ferocious beauty of what endures. — Gail Caldwell

I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice. — Gail Caldwell

It is always hard to leave a home a drama a way of life a life. So I sat there warm and safe that night held by the sea and a good man and my own good fortune victim and witness to all the transitory sweetness like Gatsby's dreams that stood before and behind me. — Gail Caldwell

The mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her. — Gail Caldwell

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity. — Gail Caldwell

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation. — Gail Caldwell

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive. — Gail Caldwell

Gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone. — Gail Caldwell

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part
time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection. — Gail Caldwell

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it. — Gail Caldwell

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. — Gail Caldwell

If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave. — Gail Caldwell

Mostly I couldn't bear ... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead. — Gail Caldwell

The flaw is the thing we love. — Gail Caldwell

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare. — Gail Caldwell

Grief is what tells you who you are alone. — Gail Caldwell

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her. — Gail Caldwell

That sometimes the smartest person in the room is the one who says, "I have no idea. — Gail Caldwell