Kate lost a mother, " I said, "but I lost a nothing." Kate doesn't feel that way, " Jack assured me. But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness.". I buried my face in his shoulder. True kindness is stabilizing, " I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz." You're the one now, " Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95) .Hilary Thayer Hamann
About This Quote
Kate lost a mother, but I lost nothing. Kate is the only person who has ever loved me, and she's the only one who ever will. But I can feel her love all around me. It keeps me warm at night, it keeps me safe from the wolves.
It keeps me strong when people tell me I'm not good enough. It defines everything that matters to me. It's everything that keeps me fighting for what's mine, keeps me fighting to be worthy of her love." she said with a smile, "but what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything." What makes it harder still is that we don't know how we would have been without her.
We don't know how we would have grown up or if we would have been happy or even normal. We don't know if we would have been different people if we hadn't had her to love and care for and guide and protect us. So we don't know how exactly it is that she was able to love us so much and so perfectly, each of us so differently, all of us so imperfectly, without knowing us at all.
And this is why we need names for things: to be able to understand them fully and completely, so that they can show us how we should be living our lives or dying our deaths; because then we'll know that it's really true that the greatest glory in living lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall; because then we'll know that there really is something greater than anything else in the world: the truth and hope and beauty of those names; because then we'll know why love was invented, why it's here at all; because then we'll know why Kate lost a mother but I lost nothing." (p. 96)
Source: Anthropology Of An American Girl
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