lilnoto 's review for:

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn

5.0

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

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“No one really wants to be idealized - we want to be seen and accepted and forgiven, and to know that we can be ourselves in our less edifying moments”

“Sometimes, I realized, we lose more from fear itself than the thing we are afraid of.”

“The best definition of happiness is the ability to approach your life as this gorgeous, unfolding work of art that's always changing, and never quite what you expect it to be.”

“And I grew to understand that the grief i felt equaled the love”

“the bigger challenge, I think, is how do we carry those losses inside us without letting them distract us too much from our lives”

“I used to think love was the feeling hanging between me and my mum on that phone call, a mix of what I felt for her and what she felt for me. But now I understand that love was the act of switching the way I responded to the moment; it existed in both the intention and the choice to consciously focus on it.”

“I will have longevity in a relationship like that, but my guess is that I will never grow that tree, and it’s OK, because I’m going to grow a more varied garden. So I’m realizing that there isn’t necessarily going to be one long love for me, but maybe a series of shorter love stories. Just as making peace with what I don’t get is going to be a series of acceptances.”

“As she said, no one person can see the whole of who we are.”

“Because life takes people from us all the time. The husband or wife we share everything with might leave the world before we do. The friends we see every week could relocate to new cities, maybe even new countries. Colleagues move on to new jobs. Kids leave home. Parents die too young.”

“That it is infinitely harder and infinitely more gloriously than i’d ever imagined”

“If you tell me, ‘I care about my partner,’ then my second question is, ‘How do you show it?’ The fact that you feel it isn’t enough.”

“my mom gave me that courage, both in her life and her death”