Between Two Kingdoms Quotes

“He has a theory: When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. “The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,” he says. “The key is to be present wherever you are right now.” This advice, more than any, stays with me.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will end”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss. Katherine’s experience and her insight sit with me. She went through something she thought she could never survive and yet here she is, surviving. “You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“As we live longer and longer, the vast majority of us will travel back and forth across these realms, spending much of our lives somewhere in between. These are the terms of our existence. The idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness? It mires us in eternal dissatisfaction, a goal forever out of reach. To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I
currently have.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“Forgiveness is a refusal to armor your own heart—a refusal to live in a constricted heart,” he said, seemingly as much to himself as to me. “Living with that openness means feeling pain. It’s not pretty, but the alternative is feeling nothing at all.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing- this is my constant work.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact. Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. Though the word may suggest otherwise, recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“EVERYONE WHO IS born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“What if I stopped thinking of pain as something that needs to be numbed, fixed, dodged, and protected against? What if I tried to honor its presence in my body, to welcome it into the present?”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“It is the certainty of never that hurts most. The knowledge that I will never eat star-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with her in the pediatric ward again. Never dance around her living room, headbanging our wigs to the beat. Never watch her paint a new masterpiece. I understand why people believe in the afterlife, why they soothe themselves with the faith that those who are no longer with us still exist elsewhere, eternally, in a celestial realm free of pain. As for me, all I know is that here on this earth, I cannot find my friend.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“We call those who have lost their spouses “widows” and children who have lost their parents “orphans,” but there is no word in the English language to describe a parent who loses a child. Your children are supposed to outlive you by many decades, to confront the burden of mortality only by way of your dying. To witness your child’s death is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language. Words simply collapse.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“The power of story is to heal and to sustain. And if we are brave enough to tell our own story, we realize we're not alone, again and again.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“After you’ve had the ceiling cave in on you—whether through illness or some other catastrophe—you don’t assume structural stability. You must learn to live on fault lines.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“They taught me that, when life brings you to the floor, there is a choice: You can allow the worst thing that’s ever happened to you to hijack your remaining days, or you can claw your way back into motion.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“I understood now why so many writers and artists, while in the thick of illness, became memoirists. It provided a sense of control, a way to reshape your circumstances on your own terms, in your own words. “That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is,” Jeanette Winterson wrote. “It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“The tangling of so much cruelty and beauty has made of my life a strange, discordant landscape. It has left me with an awareness that haunts the edges of my vision—it can all be lost in a moment—but it’s also given me a jeweler’s eye. If I’m thinking about my illness—abstracted from its impact on the people around me—then the answer is: No, I would not reverse my diagnosis if I could. I would not take back what I suffered to gain this.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“It's a funny thing, coming home. Everything smells the same, looks the same, feels the same, but you are different; the contrast between who you were when you left and who you are now is heightened against the backdrops of old haunts. (42)”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is,” Jeanette Winterson wrote. “It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“I’ve been so caught up in assessing the risks and armoring myself against them that it hasn’t occurred to me that there is a third way: to let things grow and change and evolve, to uncover who we are and what we want along the way—to live in that middle terrain”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“Grief isn’t meant to be silenced,” she says, “to live in the body and be carried alone.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“The caregiver’s life is ultimately dictated by the cycle of decay and demands of someone else’s body.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.” —”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“Time was a waiting room—waiting for doctors, waiting for blood transfusions and test results, waiting for better days.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“Wherever I am, wherever we go, home will always be the in-between place, a wilderness I’ve grown to love.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“Moving on. It’s a phrase I obsess over: what it means, what it doesn’t, how to do it for real. It seemed so easy at first, too easy, and it’s starting to dawn on me that moving on is a myth—a lie you sell yourself on when your life has become unendurable. It’s the delusion that you can build a barricade between yourself and your past—that you can ignore your pain, that you can bury your great love with a new relationship, that you are among the lucky few who get to skip over the hard work of grieving and healing and rebuilding—and that all this, when it catches up to you, won’t come for blood.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted