Rosamund Lupton, Sister
21 quotes
"When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels..."
"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."
"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."
"Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that,or was I just too concerned that you weren't going to earn a living? I know the answer...I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone's carpet, rather than realizing that you'd made color itself tactile."
"Our mind is who we are; it’s where we feel and think and believe. It’s where we have love and hate and faith and passion.’ I was getting a little embarrassed by your earnestness but you continued, ‘How can someone hope to treat another person’s mind unless they are also a theologian and a philosopher and a poet?"
"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."
"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."
"The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now."
"A selfish person can still love someone else, can't they? Even when they've hurt them and let them down."
"When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing."
"But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels..."
"...grief is loved turned into an eternal missing. ...It can't be contained in hours or days or minutes."
"Grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...."
"Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are."
"And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit."
"An explosion in space makes no sound at all."
"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."
"I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself."
"For years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at the university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn't want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult."
"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."
"However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels..."