Book: All the Little Live Things
Quotes of Book: All the Little Live Things
Isn't it complicated to be human, though?" she said. "Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally…And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn't make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance…" "The one thing," Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, "the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won't ever see her grow up. She'll have to do it without whatever I could have given her." "Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It's so important to us because we see it so close. We're individuals, we're full of ourselves, and so we're bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there's so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we'd always been and always intended to be…do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there's so much to feel and I'm greedy? book-quotelovesufferingdeathI have always said that the way to deal with the pain of other's is by sympathy, which is suffering with, and that the way to deal with one's own pain is to put one foot after the other. Yet I was never willing to suffer with others, and when my own pain hit me, I crawled into hole. Sympathy I have failed in, stoicism I have barely passed. But I have made straight A's in irony- that curse, that evasion, that armor, that way of staying safe while seeming wise. One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or other's. to hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones. book-quotelifesufferingpain
