Marion Coutts Quotes & Sayings

Tom and I sit on a bench in the garden to watch the moon melt in an arc below the horizon as fast as ice on a warm hand before we can call the others to witness its exit. — Marion Coutts

Again that weird trick: knowledge falls on to the ground that seems ready prepared though you never remember doing it. — Marion Coutts

Childbirth is nothing. Death is mighty. The 0 to our 1. There is nothing in the world like it. But there is nothing in it that is not like the world. — Marion Coutts

It is the miracle of consciousness and I am its witness.
We are Creatures.
It is bliss — Marion Coutts

And did you rise to what the occasion demanded ?
I rose so high, I left my body. — Marion Coutts

How do we recognise another person? At its most basic, by shape, by colour, by outline, by dark and light, by smell. Or by nuances of tone, by the way the face looks in repose, the cadences of the voice, full of small interior knowledge, the way they hold their mouth while listening, or the way their gaze holds yours. By what their eyes say when they are not speaking. — Marion Coutts

If we were spirits we would use crises as an oppurtunity to flit, change shape, become airborne or take to the trees. We might change from water to wood, or wood to wind. — Marion Coutts

But over and above the offers of help and love, precious and determined though they are, is the fact that we are public knowledge. Our signal has been heard. By each response a friend is activated. Our message had a single note. Here is its returning chord. — Marion Coutts

I learn so much that I previously did not know about the world of the immobile that it is hard to believe it all takes place over a few hours. At random: I learn about the casual indifference of the London cabbie to the wheelchair user and that the clearance on accessible entrances is measured in millimetres less than a knuckle. I learn how intractable it is to push a grown man around for hours and how spontaneity is the privilege of the able-bodied. In solid counterpart to all this grief, I learn about the lengths nurses are prepared to go to assist a purely recreational and ambitious project by one of their patients. — Marion Coutts

Maintaining the thinnest facade of a functioning family that tries to act as others do - plan ahead, drive somewhere, go on holiday, relax - is beyond us. We are smashed. Insecurity jams the gears on every action. Each time we are toppled. I feel a fool over and over again for trying. — Marion Coutts

So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future. — Marion Coutts

There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part. — Marion Coutts

At a party someone takes my arm and whispers to me, 'Strong Woman.' Dear God. My magic vanishes. My power dissolves like powder in water. Weakness is in those nattering companionably all around me. I want please to be one of the weak. The weak are held close and given tea. They are hugged and warmed by the fire. The strong are revered but kept at a distance. They live outside the village. — Marion Coutts

Tom's language is our weather, the sky we live under ..... — Marion Coutts

I am a blessings counter. — Marion Coutts

He is dying. Yet within the context of us, this fact can seem irrelevant. I might sometimes say, So What? This is not the same as denial. It is simply that our understanding of each other is unchanged and will not change until this is over. It sticks to us like spray on skin. He loves. He is loved, He has loved. He will be loved. — Marion Coutts

Two days after your death, in a dream you text me many times. I read the first of them. ME! And so are the living comforted. — Marion Coutts

What is coping? This is what it is like: a cave underground deep in rock, hung across its roof with accretions of dripping salts. I am cavernous and hard as mineral. The cave holds a pool of dark water that has not seen light. The water is very cold; it is undrinkable and its size is unmapped. It is mine, but people cannot see it. Only Ev sometimes senses that it is there. All the time people say that I am coping very well. It is impossible to explain my strategy to them. It is opaque even to me. — Marion Coutts