“Support and trust are time-tested tools but they prove deceptive in certain areas. Do not depend too much on trust and support. They are like the waves touching the shore.”

“Sometimes witchraft is when the heart is full of hate that it consumes your mind not appreciate good things that are done by other people.”

“Later, you told me what your mother had said. How your father, the farmer, rose up slowly. You told me how your mother wailed on the other end of the phone, grieving her loss and complaining about the basketball of a goitre perched on her shoulder. She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.”

“I would rather lie facedown on the ground and use my body as a bridge, than stand proud and tall and use my body as a wall.”

“The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

“When you try to take someone’s pain away from them, you don’t make it better. You just tell them it’s not OK to talk about their pain.”

“What we all share in common – the real reason for this book – is a desire to love better. To love ourselves in the midst of great pain, and to love another when the pain of this life grows too large for one person to hold. This book offers the skills needed to make that kind of love a reality.”

“Every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t.”

“Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

“True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.”

“Acknowledgment–being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life–is the only real medicine of grief.”

“I LOVE YOU FROM THE WAIST DOWN, I DON’T DEAL IN DAMAGED GOODS.”

“Even in the darkest times the gods are always there.”

“The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish form our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair.”

“Support and encouragement are found in the most unlikely places.”