Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that while all stories ultimately deal with death, the most meaningful ones also encompass themes of love.
Helen Humphreys highlights the paradox of storytelling and existence by asserting that every narrative inevitably confronts the concept of death. However, she introduces an optimistic perspective that within these stories, there can be an exploration of love, which enriches our understanding of life and gives deeper significance to the inevitability of mortality.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming loss, one might say, 'As Helen Humphreys puts it, 'Every story is a story about death, but our story about death can also be a story about love.'
Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.
Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.
If thou must love me, let it be for naught except for love's sake only.
And yet ... But what if ... I want to do something impossible. Something astounding and unheard of. I want to scrub the moss off the Space Shuttle and fly Julie to the moon and colonise it, or float a capsized cruise ship to some distant island where no one will protest us, or just harness the magic that brings me into the brains of the Living and use it to bring Julie into mine, because it's warm in here, it's quiet and lovely, and in here we aren't an absurd juxtaposition, we are perfect.
Love, and a cough, are not concealed.
Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.
She lived in her past life β every letter seemed to recall some circumstance of it. How well she remembered them all! His looks and tones, his dress, what he said and how β these relics and remembrances of dead affection were all that were left her in the world.
I'm lying in my bed, blanket is warm, this body will never keep me safe from harm. I still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal. Touch my skin to keep me whole. If only you'd come back to me. To feel you at my side, wouldn't need no Mojo Pin to keep me satisfied.
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