Quotes by Peter Heller

Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I dont mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

There might not be a measure of happiness left in a life, but there could be beauty and grace and endless love.

If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

When we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.

There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there was someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. And. You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of the gut. Muscles, sinew, bone. It is all of you. When you walk you propel it forward. When you let the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with sound even of breathing.

Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, dont you think? I mean if you enjoy it.

We love surfers for the same reasons we have always admired doctors and pilots and firemen and shamans, for the same reasons we admire excellent soldiers: because despite themselves they have bowed to a force much greater than themselves, which in this case is the wave, and submitted to the gnarly rigors of its discipline. They have allowed themselves to be shaped and polished by the sea. They have given themselves up to this greater force, day after day, year after year. Crushed and punished, battered into something tempered and resilient, and sharpened to an edge by constant refinement. They are warriors in the best sense: by bending to the often brutal demands of surfing they have transformed themselves into beings who can respond to great violence with grace and humility. And beauty.

That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.

I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

Within and within. Dreaming. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.

Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.

She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. Thats where were at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water.

How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

So I wonder what it is this need to tell.To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation. The only center was her mouth, her hair. It was her. A reconstitution around the core of her.

Life and death lived inside each other. Thats what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.