The Iceberg
Marion Coutts
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part.”
“So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.”
“I learn so much that I previously did not know about the world of the immobile that it is hard to believe it all takes place over a few hours. At random: I learn about the casual indifference of the London cabbie to the wheelchair user and that the clearance on accessible entrances is measured in millimetres less than a knuckle. I learn how intractable it is to push a grown man around for hours and how spontaneity is the privilege of the able-bodied. In solid counterpart to all this grief, I learn about the lengths nurses are prepared to go to assist a purely recreational and ambitious project by one of their patients.”
“How do we recognise another person? At its most basic, by shape, by colour, by outline, by dark and light, by smell. Or by nuances of tone, by the way the face looks in repose, the cadences of the voice, full of small interior knowledge, the way they hold their mouth while listening, or the way their gaze holds yours. By what their eyes say when they are not speaking.”
“He is dying. Yet within the context of us, this fact can seem irrelevant. I might sometimes say, So What? This is not the same as denial. It is simply that our understanding of each other is unchanged and will not change until this is over. It sticks to us like spray on skin. He loves. He is loved, He has loved. He will be loved.”
“Childbirth is nothing. Death is mighty. The 0 to our 1. There is nothing in the world like it. But there is nothing in it that is not like the world.”
“And did you rise to what the occasion demanded ? I rose so high, I left my body.”
“Tom's language is our weather, the sky we live under .....”
“Tom and I sit on a bench in the garden to watch the moon melt in an arc below the horizon as fast as ice on a warm hand before we can call the others to witness its exit.”
“But over and above the offers of help and love, precious and determined though they are, is the fact that we are public knowledge. Our signal has been heard. By each response a friend is activated. Our message had a single note. Here is its returning chord.”
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Book Keywords:
able-bodied, recognition, disability, uncertainty, death, compassion, family, cancer, death-and-dying, living, grief
