Liz Stephens Quotes

On the other hand, there is the person in my family, who surprisingly is not me, who keeps nearly every scrap of paper she's ever touched, just in case, just in case the world is ending and everyone has enough food and water but needs ephemera, needs slips of paper, needs old articles and wrapping paper and tax documents and someone else's past to stand in for the past of us all.
I hover somewhere between these two worlds, saving some memories, letting others fritter and slip away. Down one of these paths, it seems to me, the obsessive compulsive holding on and the equally aggressive letting go, lies madness, and even I don't know which one. Culturally and personally both
who can say, which path leads to the better place?

On the other hand, we are not given a Book of Mormon for some time, just when Christopher had begun to feel insulted. It was analogous, he said, to going to a gay bar and not being checked out. He wasn't gay, but wasn't it nice to be asked?

Of course she'll move away from me, and likely from here, because she is my daughter, because she is a daughter in the twenty-first century. But we can be her fall-back plan, and her stash of memories. Her deep and wide past.

Still, it is surely true of all animals, and all conscious people, that the pain we inflict on each other is in some ways due process for living in the world.

Emerson writes that "no one expects the days to be gods." But now, as time flies and a baby will grow in a place of my choosing, I know. The days are gods. They are each unrepeatable and each a lesson in scope and wholeness, each worth honoring. I can hold and turn these days, consider their resonance, dim and bright moments, sound the depth and know the lullingly measured length. And know that for the time being my memories, and the days in which they are created, are not the only ones of which I'm in stewardship.