Rosie Thomas

As well as remembering too little, I have seen too much

Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise what do I have left?

Try to capture what you can't bear to be without

Let her be with her memories. Better that than be aware of this reality.

I will continue my path, but I will keep a memory always.

I am afraid of losing what I have already valued.

The future offers everything. Reach out and take whatever you want.

I need them and they need me to need them

Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don't matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to piece, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity. Then you reach for the cup that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.

Things don't matter, people do

Learning is important. It is a way to make a life better for yourself and your family.

I can only strive for what is important

Is nothing in life ever straight and clear the way children see it?

How age enamels us, she would say. It builds up in layers and locks us inside our own skin, stopping us from breaking out, preventing the outside from burrowing in.

Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together.

The dead and not-yet dead, we are company all together.

They had lived and known glory, and then they were ddead. She was alive and they were not, and nothing but a heartbeat separated her from them

I am not afraid of death, which after all can't be far away. What does frighten me, though, is the halfway stage.