Quotes from Abigail Thomas

I watch the dogs, one tiny dachshund so skinny he looks like a single stroke of calligraphy.

Part of what I've learned is that if it isn't life and death, it isn't life and death.

We cut down (after much deliberation) two big prickly bushes that were growing together like eyebrows at either side of our small path.

looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen?

The past gets swallowed up in the extraordinary circumstances of now. But mostly it hurts too much to let my mind go back.

Those first days his daughter, Sally, and I took twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, sitting in a chair next to his bed, listening to the beeping of monitors in the ICU. We were afraid to leave him. It was as if we were trying to hatch an egg, keeping him warm with our presence, and we didn't want him to wake without a familiar face nearby.

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

And this is my most selfish thought, that if I lose the people I love what is left of my own life will consist only of grief.

Rosie dives under the quilt on my right, Harry on my left, and we jam ourselves together. After a little bit Harry starts to snore, Rosie rests her chin on my ankle, the blanket rises and falls with our breathing, and I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.

Death is both a certainty and an unknown, Chuck says. It's hard to get a grip on it.

Tai Chi experts, like figures on a marvelous clock, who seem in their slow-motion way to be untelling time.

The only way to contain catastrophe is to cordon it off with dates, but the numbers mean nothing. If I think instead of how much dust would have settled on Rich's bureau, then I can feel it. There is nothing like dust.

Lament the human addiction to apologies, and how easily they are botched.

But we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home, anyway, but what we cobble together out of our changing selves? Maybe there isn't any it, as my friend said, only the longing

Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.

What this really means is that he be able to appreciate my mother, whose jokes hinge on some grammatical subtlety or a working knowledge of higher mathematics. You get the picture. Robbie is about as interesting as a pair of red high-top Converse sneakers. But Robbie points to the mattress on the floor. He grins, slowly unbuckling his belt, drops his jeans. Lie down, says Robbie. This is interesting enough for me.

Australian Aborigines slept with their dogs for warmth on cold nights, the coldest being a "three dog night." —WIKIPEDIA

Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong? Wasn't my memory of a memory also real?

that method of storytelling is forgotten, that time of Eddie's in which everyone seemed to add memory on memory deep in the forest, layers of dirt and leaves and branches get covered up—in a sense the past is underfoot.

She was tired of relationships whose greatest intimacy consisted of sitting up all night weeping while love died.

You can appreciate things at four in the morning that would go right past you during the day.

What is art, anyway, except not pounding on walls.

and you have to take gladly what life offers, she has learned that much, and sometimes you get lucky. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? There's nothing wrong with that.