Barbara Ascher quotes

Grief is like the wind. When it's blowing hard, you adjust your sails and run before it. If it blows too hard, you stay in the harbor, close the hatches and don't take calls. When it's gentle, you go sailing, have a picnic, take a swim.
-- Barbara Ascher

#Running #Grief #Blow

Discover that we are capable of solitary joy and having experienced it, know that we have touched the core of self.
-- Barbara Ascher

#Self #Joy #Solitary

A red brick Presbyterian church... captured by kudzu vines as surely as a butterfly in a net.
-- Barbara Ascher

#Butterfly #Church #Vines

From beginning to end this is a wet and blood smeared voyage, this begetting and birthing and moving away.
-- Barbara Ascher

#Moving #Blood #Voyages

The hot, moist smell of babies fresh from naps.
-- Barbara Ascher

#Baby #Naps #Smell

Siblings may be ambivalent about their relationships in life, but in death the power of their bond strangles the surviving heart. Death reminds us that we are part of the same river, the same flow from the same source, rushing towards the same destiny. Were you close? Yes, but we didn't know it then.
-- Barbara Ascher

#Sibling #Heart #Destiny

Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.

When the guy says go, you start to suffer - or you might as well not be out there. It's a small piece of your life, make it hurt.

Now I've even gotten to running out to the fan buses that pass by our house, so I can talk to the people. I think I'm trying to gather fans, frankly. They're very, very nice people - they really understand. It's fun talking to them.

The day we run out of petrol is the day Iran will be free.

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.

See how time makes all grief decay.

Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

Let's blow some stuff up.

The heaviest blow which ever struck humanity was Christianity; Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.

Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.