52 Quotes by Dorothy Gilman

Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.

It's compassion that makes gods of us.

Everything matters terribly to children, you know, they're fresh and unformed ...

my rebelliousness went so deep that, faced with a can of asparagus that instructed me to open at this end, I always, stubbornly, opened it at the other.

... people misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.

... both therapy and friendship possessed the common denominator of discovering a self ...

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.

We overlook how much in our lives is invisible; love, for instance; thought, God, the future, time, faith, hope and even the electricity that brings us light.