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the territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace.

Gail Caldwell

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Gail Caldwell
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: January 20
Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Grief
Commonplace
Cruel
Territory

More quotes by Gail Caldwell

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Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages.
Gail Caldwell
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I know now that we never get over great losses we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
Gail Caldwell
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Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear.
Gail Caldwell
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You can’t change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn’t make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don’t get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.
Gail Caldwell
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The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.
Gail Caldwell
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The flaw is the thing we love.
Gail Caldwell
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What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.
Gail Caldwell
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If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.
Gail Caldwell
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It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.
Gail Caldwell
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Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.
Gail Caldwell
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That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.
Gail Caldwell
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memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain.
Gail Caldwell
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Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.
Gail Caldwell
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Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.
Gail Caldwell
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The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.
Gail Caldwell
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I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice.
Gail Caldwell
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Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.
Gail Caldwell