Abigail Thomas Quotes

But when it gets dark, I'm off the hook. The day is officially rolled up and put away. I'm free to watch movies or stare at the wall, no longer holding myself accountable for what I might or might not have gotten done because the time for getting something done is over until tomorrow.

You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.

Here's what I love about painting. It's not about words or voice or tone or point of view or narrative arc (perish the thought); it's about the way certain branches stick straight out from the trunks of certain trees; it's about the clouds that you can barely see as well as the ones that pile on top of each other; it's about the swoop of telephone wires and the shapes and colors of shadows. A real painter recently told me that all artists want to draw telephone wires.

There are three things that make me want to drink: difficult times, when I want alcohol to either alleviate the pain or allow me to feel it; clear days that make me want to scribble all over the irritating blue sky; and well, waking up in the morning.

It's easy now - it's middle-aged lady, nobody's looking, nobody notices. I go without lipstick if I feel like it, and I always wear my comfy clothes. It's a life with fewer distractions, but should something beautiful show up, a middle-aged woman is free to stare.

There is nothing like calamity for refreshing the moment. Ironically, the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles.

other people's condiments are depressing.

When I was young, the future was where all the good stuff was kept, the party clothes, the pretty china, the family silver, the grown-up jobs. The future was a land of its own, and we couldn't wait to get there. Not that youth wasn't great, but it came with disadvantages; I remember the feeling I was missing something really good that was going on somewhere else, somewhere I wasn't. I remember feeling life passing me by. I remember impatience. I don't feel that way now.

It isn't just the dying part; it's the thought of the day coming when I will have already been dead five, ten, two hundred years. All those centuries piling on top of me, like so many fallen trees. The fact that I will neither know nor care is of little comfort because I'm not, as yet, dead. The only cure for the fear of death is death.

Why does forgiveness irritate me so much?" I ask Chuck.
"Because it's the ultimate act of passive aggression," he says.
"Because it keeps sin alive," says my sister.

Somewhat leaky boat are on the lookout for a human companion. Not me. I have learned to love the inside of my own head. There isn't much I'd rather say than think. Of course for more than thirty years I've had Chuck. We've known each other so long that we don't have to talk, and when we do we don't have to say anything. When he asks me if I'd like to take a trip around the world I can say yes knowing I'll never have to go.

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

Love Love can accommodate all sorts of misshapen objects: a door held open for a city dog who runs into the woods; fences down; some role you didn't ask for, didn't want. Love allows for betrayal and loss and dread. Love is roomy. Love can change its shape, be known by different names. Love is elastic. And the dog comes back.

Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong?

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.

SIX MONTHS AGO A FRIEND WAS ANGRY WITH ME and I with her. I had written about something someone said many years ago, but it was she who heard the words, not me, a fact I had completely forgotten. Her experience was precious, and she accused me of stealing her memory. Not only that, but what she remembered with grief I had somehow transmuted to gratitude, so besides stealing her memory, I also got it wrong. We argued, but there was no meeting place. For days the same questions went through my head. Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong? Wasn't my memory of a memory also real? There were no solid answers, just winding paths I went round and round on. I thought of nothing else; a chasm had opened between me and my friend.

Maybe there are clusters of souls born again and again into the same repertory company, and with each new birth they play different parts in a different play. Or maybe it's the same play. This would account for those moments of Oh! there you are! After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.

I tried not to think of this as an omen, but unwelcome thoughts enter my head all the time.

I used to get upset if somebody I didn't like loved a book I loved. That's MY book, I'd think.

A friend's mother ate nothing but clams for six months. Morning, noon, and night, nothing but clams. 'I don't know what it is - I can't seem to get enough of them' she told her son. He shakes his head, but I understand. I eat nothing but broccoli for a month, then yogurt for six days, then (for one glorious week) lamb chops. One day I roasted a chicken and had seven chicken sandwiches before nightfall. If I like something, I like it a lot. Just one doesn't cut it. I don't know what it is I can't get enough of.

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

Shopping is hope.

There's nothing I want to relive - certainly not youth - and as for what's to come, I'm in no hurry. I watch my dogs. They throw themselves into everything they do; even their sleeping is wholehearted. They aren't waiting for a better tomorrow, or looking back at their glory days. Following their example, I'm trying to stick to the present. I'm not stranded here, I know where I've been; I can conjure up details of old haunts, even former states of mind.

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.

Yesterday in his hospital room my husband asked urgently, "Will you move me twenty-six thousand miles to the left?""Yes," I said, not moving from my chair. After a moment he said, "Thank you," adding in wonder, "I didn't feel a thing.

He said maybe irony is the lens through which we see the picture in reverse

Being cautious is new territory; my specialty was leaping, not looking. These days I pay attention. You can stumble uphill as easily as down. Ice comes in smooth and corrugated. Plastic bags are slippery underfoot. A big dog can knock you to your knees.

But we don't get to choose what sticks. How many times I have run my fingers along a picket fence and thought, "This! I will remember this moment always!" and all that remains is the memory of a desire to hold on to a memory.

Suffering is the finest teacher", said an old friend long ago. "It teaches you details.

If you were to look into our apartment in the late morning, or early afternoon, or toward suppertime, you might find us together sleeping. Of course a good rainy day is preferable, but even on sunny summer days, the dogs and I get into bed.

A couple of years ago my sister Judy and I were each given a box of truffles. The tiny print said two pieces contained 310 calories and there were six pieces in each box. We were sitting on the bus headed downtown, quietly doing our calculations: Judy was dividing by two and I was multiplying by three. When she realized what I was doing, a look came over her face that is hard to describe. 'I lost all hope for you' she says now.

Grief is not a pleasure, but it makes me remember, and I am grateful.

But they were writers and writers suggest things just to see what happens next.

The past is in the wastebasket.

What can come? my grandson Sam asked, when he was very young, after his mother had warned him not to go into the woods after dark. What can come? This was a brilliant question. Can is scarier than will. What will come limits itself. What can come has no boundaries.

Well now I know I can control my tongue, my temper & my appetites, but that's it. I have no effect on weather, traffic or luck. I can't make good things happen; I can't keep anybody safe; I can't influence the future & I can't fix up the past. What a relief!
from book A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

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

The connection with him is a connection with part of myself, and it has to do with a kind of insatiable curiosity. I mean the part of me that gets connected to the rest of me when I'm connecting to him. The insatiably curious part.

I used to lie in a lover's arms getting a stiff neck, or needing to scratch my nose, or losing all sensation in my arm, unwilling to move lest the man find out I wasn't comfortable in his embrace...Would Snow White have rested all eight pounds of her head on any part of the prince? I doubt it, and I never did either. Sarah says that is why elderly women have such prominent cords in their necks.

It was a long time before I realized that you don't have to start right, you just have to start. Put pen to paper, allow yourself the freedom to write badly, to get it wrong, stop looking over your own shoulder.

The thought that this happened and then this happened and then this and this and this, the relentless march of event and emotion tied together simply because day follows day and turns into week following week becoming months and years reinforces the fact that the only logical ending for chronological order is death.

She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she'd been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, "Hey Jude" was on the radio, it was her prayer, her manifesto, almost her dwelling place. She sang it everywhere. The music made her cry then; it makes her cry now. Listening to it now brings back memories so sharp they taste like blood in her mouth.

THERE ARE ENORMOUS HOLES IN MY EDUCATION. I left college in March of my freshman year and never went back. I've never read Moby-Dick and it's probably too late now. I know nothing about the history of music or the history of art except what I've learned through osmosis. But Outsider Art is its own context. I don't have to know all about the Impressionists or the Abstract Expressionists. I don't have to be able to fit this art into any historic chronology. I don't feel like an ignoramus. Irony of ironies, I don't feel like an outsider - to fall in love I only need eyes.

I WAS ON A SMALL ISLAND ONCE, IN THE MIDDLE OF a great big lake, mountains all over the place, and as I watched the floating dock the wind kicked up, the waves rose from nowhere, and I imagined myself lying there and the dock suddenly breaking loose, carried away by the storm. I wondered if I could lie still and enjoy the sensation of rocking, after all I wouldn't be dead yet, I wouldn't be drowning, just carried off somewhere that wasn't part of my plan. The very thought of it gave me the shivers. Still, how great to be enjoying the ride, however uncertain the outcome. I'd like that. It's what we're all doing anyway, we just don't know it.

Don't worry," I say, putting a PG Tips tea bag in her mug. "It's been happening for years. It's not getting worse. Besides, I'm not hearing voice, I'm overhearing them. I just don't know what they are saying.

I have decided that when I'm dead I'd like my body in the woods under a light coating of leaves. That being against the law, maybe I will go for cremation. I ask Chuck what he wants done with his remains. "Remains?" says Chuck. "Do there have to be remains? Can't I just vanish? Be no more?" I tell him I'm sorry but yes, he has to have remains. "Either I'm too young to be thinking about this," he says, "or I have to figure out a way of offing myself that will leave no remains. I could get in the shower with a chain saw,

Wonderful news, a lovely day, but I don't trust good news and I don't like good weather. Dread has been my faithful companion, and without it I am alone.

Drip and fling and pour color onto the glass. Then I push the paint around. You have to have some faith. If it looks like nothing, if you think you've destroyed what might have been a good painting, keep at it. If you've scraped all but a few streaks away, chances are those streaks will suggest something else. Don't give up. Don't be afraid of the mess.

I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.