“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” ~ Ernest Hemmingway.
Stephen Shore on Grief
SS Oh yes. Although when I look back at that period, I think it’s just in my nature to take the events of life and somehow plough ahead. The couple of years after my parents died are the most productive years I’ve had. I think that’s how I dealt with it. I couldn’t do anything about it. I was not going to rematerialise them.
AS But you didn’t go into a room and close yourself in, which is the poet route.
SS Exactly. The route I took was to get in the car and drive and spend all day taking pictures.
Stephen Shore & Alec Soth / Financial Times, 10th May 2019
Barbara Ehrenreich on Mortality
In fact, if you’re not prepared to die when you’re almost sixty, then I would say you’ve been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being.
~ Barbara Ehrenreich
Meryl Streep on Bereavement
No matter what you do, the pain is always there in some recess of your mind, and it affects everything that happens afterwards. I think you can assimilate the pain and go on without making an obsession of it.
~ Meryl Streep
Marcus Aurelius on Life
“…life is a war and a journey in a foreign land, and afterwards oblivion.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
Meg Wolitzer on Drive
What drives you on?
I said in The Ten-Year Nap that I feel like work is the anti-death. So I think it’s about mortality.
~ Meg Wolitzer / Financial Times, February 22, 2019