18 Quotes by Julia Whelan

He doesn’t ask the big questions. Why me? Why my brother? What’s the point of it all? What’s next? I’ve never heard him ponder, doubt, rail. I can only assume he got all of that out of his system the first time around, with Oliver. That first great loss, like a first love, I suppose, that prompts the questioning. Maybe, once you come to realize that there are no answers, you learn to live with the questions.

Now, we don’t always get to choose what happens in life, don’t we all know. However, we can choose what we do with what we’re given.

The hardest thing is love, with no expiration date, no qualifiers, no safety net. Love that demands acceptance of all the things I cannot change. Love that doesn’t follow a plan.

It occurs to me now, that being called upon to do something because you’re good at it is not the same thing as having a calling.

Losing someone is hard enough. But death without the process of dying is an abomination.

We already have each other’s back. To protect, not stab. That’s universal sisterhood, no matter which country you come from.

He always said that waiting for me to learn how to talk was like waiting for his long-lost friend to arrive.

Our memories of places, much like people, are subject to our own adaptation process. Once the active living is done, and they pass into memory, we assume control of the narrative. We adapt it, sometimes without meaning to. This is, perhaps, the one advantage of death: when people die, they can live on in our memory as we choose, but places continue to exist, to change.

It turns out, the act of making a choice, of choosing a path, doesn’t mean the other path disappears. It just means that it will forever run parallel to the one you’re on. It means you have to live with knowing what you gave up.