Rosamund Lupton

“Can you get a summer snow-globe instead of a winter one with green grass and flowering azalea bushes and blue sky? Because I'm here, inside it. If you shake it, perhaps it fills with black smoke, not swirling snowflakes.”

“You told me once that the last of the senses to go is hearing. But you're wrong. The last of the senses to go is love.”

“Because I'd rather feel guilty for the rest of my life than for her to have felt a second's fear.”

“It's not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it's the parents who are made to get the hell out of cozy family nest by their teenage offspring. It's we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don't manage it.”

“Bubonic plague is 'natural,' I snapped back. Doesn't mean it's good for you.”

“Sleep, baby, sleepYour father tends the sheepYour mother shakes the dreamland treeAnd from it fall sweet dreams of theeSleep, baby, sleep.”

“But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. ... Living my life. And it wouldn't be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.”

“It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people's too - yours, Leo's, Dad's. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.”

“And I felt closer to you. Because you knew me so much better than I'd realized - and still loved me.”

“An explosion in space makes no sound at all.”

“Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.”

“I hadn't understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It's ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that's rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with color and light and air.”

“There is no new beginning. No second chance.You turned to me and I wasn't there.You are dead. If I had taken your call, you would be alive.It's as blunt as that.I'm sorry.”

“I don't believe outstandingly beautiful and charismatic women create obsession in what would otherwise be normal men, but rather they attract the weirdos and the stalkers; flames in the darkness that these disturbing people inhabit, unwittingly drawing them closer until they extinguish the very flame they were drawn to.”

“You were right. As you know. Other people may sail through lives of blue seas, with only the occasional squall, but for me life has always been a mountain--sheer faced and perilous. And, as I think I told you, I had clung on with the footholds and crampons and safety ropes of a safe job and flat and secure relationship.”

“...death does leave a daunting array of practical tasks: all those possessions that you were forced to leave behind had to be sorted and packed and redistributed in the living world.”

“I know that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.”

“The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now.”

“As I waited, I flicked through a magazine in a futile bid to look occupied. It had the next month's date on the cover and I remembered you laughing at time-traveling fashion mags, saying the date on the cover should alert people to their absurdity inside.”

“...grief is loved turned into an eternal missing. ...It can't be contained in hours or days or minutes.”

“Was the feeling that all is right with the world, my world, because your were its foundations, formed in childhood and with me grown into adulthod -- was that to replaced by nothing? The ghastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now.”

“Motherhood isn't soft and cozy and sweet; it's selfish ferocity, red in tooth and claw.”

“However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...”

“I threw everything we had together - the strong roots and stems and leaves and beautiful soft blossoms of sisterhood - into the earth with you. And I was left standing on the edge, so diminished by the loss that I thought I could no longer be there.”

“But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children's lives.”

“There was no harbor for hope.”

“A siren is the sound of the twenty-first-century cavalry on the way.”

“A child's body is so much a part of who they are; maybe because we can hold a little boy in our arms. We can hold the whole of him. But when we grow too large to be held our body no longer defines us”

“Grief is love turned into an eternal missing”

“Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.”

“For a moment amongst the crowd, I saw you. I've since found out it's common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one amongst strangers; something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered. This cruel trick of the mind lasted only a few moments, but was long enough to feel with physical force how much I needed you.”

“Mum handed me back my engagement ring and I slipped it on. I found the weight of it around my finger comforting, as it Todd was holding my hand.”

“Sex and laughter. The heart and lungs of a relationship.”

“„Bila si u pravu, kao što znaš. Ostali ljudi mogli su ploviti kroz živote plavih mora, uz tek pokoji nalet vjetra praćen kišom, ali za mene je život oduvijek bio poput planine... strmih litica i opasan. I kao što mislim da sam ti rekla, držala sam se pomoću uporišta, spona, penjalica i sigurnosne užadi sigurnoga posla, stana i sigurne veze.”

“„Crkveno zvono počelo se oglašavati. Nema sablasnijeg zvuka. Nema otkucaj života ni ljudski ritam, samo mehanički naglašava gubitak. Morali smo sad ući u crkvu. Smatrala sam to nemogućim i jednako zastrašujućim kao prekoračiti preko prozora navrh nebodera.”

“„Dok sam promatrala tu gomilu ispred crkve i pomislila na sve one nagurane u njoj, zamišljala sam kako svaka ta osoba nosi vlastite uspomene na tebe... tvoj glas, tvoje lice, tvoj smijeh, na ono što si učinila ili rekla... i kad bi se na neki način svi ti djelići tebe mogli spojiti, na neki način bismouspjeli stvoriti potpunu sliku tebe, zajedno bismo te mogli zadržati.”

“„Ali bilo mi je žao. Još uvijek mi je. Bilo mi je žao što sam propustila zapaziti kako sam samo ja na sigurnoj zaobilaznici, dok je on u toj vezi bio sam i izložen. Ponovno sam bila sebična i okrutna prema nekome za koga sam se trebala pobrinuti.Prije tvoje smrti mislila sam kako je naša veza zrela i razumna. Ali s moje strane, bila je kukavička, pasivna opcija potaknuta više mojom nesigurnošću negoli onim što je Todd zasluživao... aktivnim izborom kojemu je poticaj bila ljubav.”

“„... bit je u tome što sam oduvijek smatrala kako je tijelo više od tek obične posude za dušu.”

“„Biljke su bile previše prolazne i kratkotrajne. Ja sam više voljela skupljati porculanske ukrase, čvrste pouzdane beživotne predmete koji se slijedećeg dana ne bi promijenili ni uvenuli.”

“„... kako je besmisleno vječno živjeti sretno.”

“„Prije nekoliko mjeseci to bi mi bilo odbojno. Na svu sreću, postajem malo manje zadrta što se tiče dodira.”

“„Tijelu su mi potrebni tragovi iz stvarnoga izvanjskoga svijeta, a ne klima sjećanja.”

“„Dok sam razgovarala s gospodinom Wrightom, ponovno sam imala povez preko očiju u minskome polju. Tvoja smrt nikada neće biti razoružana na sjećanje, ali naučila sam u nekim danima, dobrim danima, kako je zaobići.Ali ne danas.”

“„Kao što ste rekli, vrijeme prestaje imati svaki smisao kad umre netko koga voliš.”

“„Sjećaš se onih žlićica za kavu iz 1930-tih, svake poput rastopljenog bombona? Tako sam ja živjela svoj život, u malim odmjerenim dozama. Ali tvoja smrt bila je golemo more i tonula sam. Jesi li znala da ocean može biti dubok sedam milja? Nikakvo sunce ne može prodrijeti tako duboko. U potpunome mraku samo izobličeni, neprepoznatljivi oblici opstaju na životu, mutacijske emocije za kakve, sve do tvoje smrti, nisam ni znala da postoje.”

“„Kad sam ugledala tvoj pramen kose, znala sam da je tuga ljubav pretovrena u vječno nedostajanje.”

“„Ne znam koliko je bilo sati. Vrijeme mi više ništa nije značilo. Obično vrijeme sve mijenja i na sve utječe, ali kad umre netko koga voliš, vrijeme to ne može promijeniti, nijedna količina vremena nikada to neće promijeniti, tako da vrijeme prestaje imato svako značenje.”

“Because you are my sister in every fiber of my being....but there are aother strands that link us, that wouldn't be seen by even the strongest electron microscope.......We are conjoined by hundreds os thousands of memories that silt down into you and stop being memories and become a part of who you are.”

“My job isn't to go around judging people. Priests are meant to teach love and forgiveness. That to me is the essence of being a Christian. And trying to find that love and forgiveness in ourselves and others every day should be a challenge that we want to achieve.”

“I'm a sliver-thin light, diamond sharp, that can slip through gaps in the world we know. I will come into your dreams and speak soft words when you think of me. There is no happy ever after - but there is an afterwards.This isn't our ending.”