Lee Tergesen Quotes

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you.

All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.

When everything in a person's life is gone, ripped-out gone, it's not that you stay empty for so long, so you replace it with something else very quickly.

I think I tried to separate indoors and out. And so when he beat me indoors, I did not see that as letting anybody down, I saw it as a good head to head competition, and so it was. It was fine.

After I lost my fiance, it seemed like it would be better to always be alone than to risk being hurt again.

Being funny wasn't a career choice growing up, it was my way out of situations; a way to survive another day.

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

I think if you come from a history of persecution you have to develop a sense of humour.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

When you're on the battlefield, you switch off your soul; otherwise, you would die of terror - you would die of fear. You switch off your soul, and you act like an animal or a machine.

At a certain point, I think, you harden yourself to the realities of the business.

When I went to prison, for three years I didn't say a word to another human being until, going into the fourth year, when I realized, 'You know what, I have to find a way to live.'

They always say, 'Time heals.' But it really doesn't. You just get used to it. I live life with the mentality of 'OK, I lost the only thing that has ever been important to me.' So going forward, anything bad that happens can't be nearly as bad as what happened before.

When I lost my brother, it kind of messed me up because in my city, I know everybody. I kind of felt untouchable.

If someone has gone through a lot of emotional pain, including the loss of loved ones, that person may try to build a shell around his or her feelings to protect him- or herself from the pain.

There was a point that I stopped crying. It's not just because I didn't feel pain anymore, not because I didn't feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES--modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft.

That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop.

So goodbye, I'll be leaving, I see no sense in this crying and grieving. We'll both live a lot longer, if you live without me.

I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.