the swell of clear water

"I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to the feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that."
--Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

grief

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death ... Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself."
--Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

estrangement

"There is this place deep inside where I feel I am connected to everything, not just trees and grass and dogs but buildings and stairways, rocks and sidewalks. It's a deathly quiet place that I guess I've never shared with anyone and probably shouldn't, a place that is cold sober when my body is stumbling drunk, another consciousness that sits still like an antenna in tune with some other part of the galaxy. It was this part of me that I wanted to bring to our wedding, a centered space from which I could send out my oaths. I imagined that this secret antenna was my connection to whatever eternity might be and was the part of me that Christy alone perceived and loved. It was that same magic timeless part of her that I wanted to marry. But in the dark of the motel room, I realized that whether I was married or not, no one would ever know all of me; my truest self would always be estranged and alone. I was incapable of expressing my limited screwball faith and I knew that, even if I could, I'd box it in so dramatically it would be trivialized. I began to feel the familiar swell of numbing anger."
--Ethan Hawke, Ash Wednesday

glass

"I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish."
----
"I hate it when people talk about twists of fate ... when it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be."
--Julia Glass, Three Junes

just enjoy

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time."
--Edith Wharton

accordian of time

"Time plays like an accordian in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note."
--Julia Glass, Three Junes