Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits

-Emily Dickinson

 

 

Excerpt from This American Life regarding children confronting their parents:

Aric Knuth

I have two completely different understandings of my dad in my head. One is that dad I knew and missed and was really mad at as a kid, and one is the dad I know now. And I don't know. I feel like maybe asking him those questions, I wanted to conjure up that younger version and see what a total jerk he was so that I could really be mad at him. It didn't happen. And I just saw the dad that I've known for the past few years. And I'm not really mad at him.

Ira Glass

Right. You're still mad at that young dad.

Aric Knuth

But he's gone. And there's this sweet, kind of sad, loving, older guy there now.

Ira Glass

But how unsatisfying for you and for everyone who wants to confront their parents, given the fact that the people who they're mad at are sort of gone and have been replaced by these kinder, gentler, more sensitive people.

Aric Knuth

Totally unsatisfying. And I think probably then confronting your parents never works. Confronting your parents never works because by the time you get around to doing it, your parents are totally different people.

Ira Glass

Yeah.

Aric Knuth

They're gone, and there are these different beings sitting in front of you when you confront them.

 

 Excerpts from Gilead

...

It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over.

...

There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.

...

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

...

I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity.

...

I got pretty good at pretending I understood more than I did, a skill which has served me through life.

...

It’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.

...

I used to walk over before sunrise just to sit there and watch the light come into that room. I don’t know how beautiful it might seem to anyone else. I felt much at peace those mornings.

...

In those days, as I have said, I might spend most of a night reading. Then, if I woke up still in my armchair, and if the clock said four or five, I’d think how pleasant it was to walk through the streets in the dark.

...

I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings.

...

The worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.

...

I have thought about that very often—how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next.

...

In every important way we are such secrets from each other.

...

He said, “When I was young I thought a settled life was what happened to you if you weren’t careful.”

 

She said, “I always knew better than that. It was the one thing I wanted. I used to look in people’s windows at night and wonder what it was like.”

...

All that time he was looking at me as if to say, let’s just be honest with each other for five minutes.