Quotes About Healing

El tiempo cura y nos mata. Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

You can't let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There's always a chance you'll want to use it later.

I wondered if DSS had anything like Step 9, where you eventually have to apologize to all the kids you've screwed over.

Sophie's mother had to leave her dad, to get sober. She says as long as you're living with an addict, you're addicted.

The wounds of this ruptured nation lie open and ugly.

Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...

She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like a sunburn, or just kept blazing.

A dead parent is a tricky kind of ghost. If you can make it into more like a doll, putting it in the real house and clothes and such that they had, it helps you to picture them as a person instead of just a person-shaped hole in the air.

believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book

every step you take, as regards the druggie mother?

Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.

AS LONG AS I KEPT MOVING, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown.

A dead parent is a tricky kind of ghost. If you can make it into more like a doll, putting it in the real house and clothes and such that they had, it helps you to picture them as a person instead of just a person-shaped hole in the air. Which helps you feel less like a person-shaped invisible kid.

Maybe it's true what they say, that as long as you're nursing your own pain, whatever it is, you'll turn your back on others in the same boat. You'll want to believe the fix they're in is their own damn fault.

it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

carry a heart past unbearable losses...and strike its path through one more day: Get up and make intentions. I intend to call a friend on the phone. I intend to notice the flowers in the yard.

Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, i have taught myself joy, over and over again.

They wanted payback. I thought about what Rose said, wanting to see the rest of us hurt, because she was hurting. You have to wonder how much of the whole world's turning is fueled by that very fire.

She stops trying to talk for a while, since there is nothing to say about a lost child that can change one star in a father's lonely sky.

But I don't happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?

You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.