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The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister
Kyleigh Leddy
Top 10 Best Quotes
“You wish there was an adequate term for what you are—like orphan or widower—a term that says 'I once meant something to somebody.”
“When you experience severe loss at a young age—the kind of loss that makes you think your own life no longer worth living—it is as if a gulf has appeared, dividing the world into two separate, insurmountable cliffs: those who understand, who have lost someone truly dear to them, and those who do not understand.”
“Tragedy can strike without premonition. A natural disaster can arrive when the kids are playing with their Christmas presents. The narrative containers we use to impose structure and morality onto our lives no longer fit. Happy endings do not necessitate good deeds. Pain is immune to virtue.”
“Suffering is never imagined. The brain is the body, the brain is physical. We accept that our bodies can be injured—a broken bone, an infectious disease—but we ignore the injuries endured by our brains, because we assume a sense of control over our psychological hurt. This control is often an illusion.”
“Only after we relinquish what is lost are we truly healed.”
“No one tells you what a precious, fragile gift your mind is in the first place. No one tells you it can be lost.”
“It might be possible to code technology to predict human speech patterns or program artificial intelligence to respond back to our questions. We might suffer a migraine when we’re stressed—a dagger at our temple—but when our souls are irreparably damaged, it’s not our minds that hurt. It’s right there in the violent wanting of our chests. You know this because yours has just broken.”
“You wish there was an adequate term for what you are—like orphan or widower—a term that says “I once meant something to somebody.” When you were a little girl, you went mute from lack of need, but now you are mute with grief.”
“When something truly terrible happens, we fixate on the details, the minutiae, the chronology. Do these specifics ground us somehow? Do we focus on the quotidian because we know that nothing will ever be nothing again?… Never again will the sky hold the unblemished clarity of a life without loss.”
“We keep and keep and keep. We remember and remember and remember. We collect heart-shaped shells and signs and old notebooks and recollections. We hold on, memorize the lines of her tan, slender hands and the sound of her laugh, engraving ourselves with the smallest details, lest we ever forget. We try to make amends, reason with ghosts, explain ourselves to the wind. And then, there comes a time when we must let go.”
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Book Keywords:
healing, inspirational, grief-and-loss, mental-health-awareness, memoir, mental-health, siblings