Jonathan Tropper Quotes

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

Is childhood ever long enough, or a happy time, or even a beautiful summer day? All of these carry the seeds of the same fierce mystery that we call death.

Learning of my father's passing at age 55 not only shattered the world, far from home, that had become my reality, but catapulted my childhood and relationship with family - which had felt like another lifetime - into the present.

If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.

My earliest memories are the best. I always try to remember the good times when Daddy was alive.

My father died when I was only five years old, and that was the moment when I learned a cruel lesson that tomorrow, in fact, might not be another day.

When your mother dies, you're not a little girl any more.

It's the continuation of everyone's childhood to see these young children who grow up full of life, full of intelligence, full of a sense of wonder. And within an instant they're gone from this world. It's terrible.

The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears. That is how I would mark the beginning of my life: the way people mark the end of one. My family had gathered at Papa Joe's house because Mam' Grace was slipping away, only I didn't register it that way. For some reason I thought that it was her birthday.

Childhood. I wish I had something to complain about.

I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn't coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.

I've not really had a bad Christmas. Apart from serious things, like when my father died. He rather spoiled the party and I've never forgiven him for falling off the twig on Christmas Day.

Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Death was a big part of my life growing up. I went to lots of funerals.

Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.

She said that her father's death had been the hardest thing in her life. "We are all children until our fathers die.

Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

Life is a process of one goneness after another.

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.

I was an only child growing up, and my father passed away when I was twelve, so for most of my life, it was just me and my momma. We were really, really close. Learning to live in the world without her has been incredibly hard. At first, it didn't make any sense - how to do it, to live without her - but you slowly get somewhat used to it.

We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world.

Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God, I'm still alive.' But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.