13 Quotes by Anna Lyndsey

Most of the time, I do not want to die. But I would like to have the means of death within my grasp. I want to feel the luxury of choice, to know the answer to “How do I bear this?” need not always be “Endure.

...There is a duty of solidarity among all us impossible, near-invisible people: a duty, out of sheer cussedness, not to disappear completely, simply to ease the conscience of the rest.

In the end we have one choice: to suffer well or suffer badly, to reach for or to reject that quality which is termed, equally, by both religious and secular, grace.

Joy lurks in every mundane thing, just waiting to be found. Love is impervious to reason. And words are wonderful.

My love has saved me. It wraps strong arms around me when I cry with despair;it gives me the routine of a working week to lend vicarious structure to my shapeless days. It brings me daily laughter, a reason to keep washing...and it slices me open with guilt.

By staying, by shirking the responsibility and effort of leaving, by continuing to occupy this lovely man while giving him neither children nor a public companion nor a welcoming home-do I do wrong?

And all my ethical reasoning crumbles to ash in the sheer fact of his presence. Because together, even in darkness, we light up a room; because the clotted guilt inside me breaks up and disperses before a surge of stupid happiness; because I love him, and I know I cannot leave him, am incapable of leaving him, unless he asks me to go. And he has not asked me. And that is the miracle which I live with, every day.

But for the most part, people - of the right kind - are good. For them I put on my corset of cheerfulness, a solid serviceable garment. It holds in the bulgings and oozings of emotion, and soon I find they are, temporarily, stilled.

Each small accommodation of my physical environment is an admission that things are not improving, that this is not some fleeting horror, that perhaps...But that is the unthinkable thought.