The bridge series Quotes

“Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me.”

“Would my head were a head of lettuce. I drove the last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the state police closed it off. The Cape Cod Canal all atempest beneath. No cars coming, no cars going. The bridge cables flapping like rubber bands. You think in certain circumstances a few thousand feet of bridge isn’t a thousand miles? The hurricane wiped out Dennis. Horace thanked God for insurance. I saved our little girl. You want me to say, Hurrah! Hurrah! but I can’t, I won’t, because to save her once isn’t to save her, and still she thumps as if the world was something thumpable. As if it wasn’t silence on a fundamental level. Yap on, wife, yap on. Thump, daughter, thump. Louder, Orangutan, louder. I can’t hear you.”

“Federal regulations forbid delaying inspections for fracture-critical bridges like the fallen Minneapolis bridge - the kind with a lack of redundancy in design, so that a single failure in a load-bearing part can cause the entire bridge to collapse.”

“What's the difference between people who see and seek gaps and those that see and seek bridges? The first stops and stays on the side. The second, crosses and reaches new worlds.As soon as your mind identifies the bridge, the gap is gone...but the bridge was always there...you just had to see it.There are holes in the ground, yet a bridge (which is there, but may take time to see) filled it. That's where asking better questions comes in. Where is the bridge so I can cross? There is one. Believing there is a bridge from where you are to where you want to go is 99% of the battle. The other 1% is to cross it.But do I have to build the bridge? Maybe. But everything is first created in the mind and then in the world. The bridge is there. See it. Cross it.”

“You have to cross many bridges and you have to walk many paths in your life! But what is more important than this is to know which bridges you should not cross and which paths you must not walk!”

“On the way we talked about the road sign Bridge Ices Before Road. I always wondered, If that's a problem, why don't they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they use to build the road? Drema explained that the bridge isn't made out of different material than the road, but that the bridge ices quicker because it's alone, hanging there without the land under it to keep it warm.”

“Only in a place like this do earth and sky come together in such a way that they bridge into one, and in such a place a person could put up her arms and find herself in heaven.”

“The angels came to tell me what I could expect and how to get where I needed to go. I was reassured that I would not have to cross the Bridge alone. There were so many things I did not yet know. I could feel my mental clarity leaving. I fixed my gaze upon her. I watched her as I left. It was like shutting the door of a beloved home for the last time. Like closing up camp for the season. One last look at the ocean before you must leave it behind with hopes of return but with no guarantee. You eventually have to turn away and look the other direction so that you can see where it is you are going.”

“We think that we are living when we walk upon the earth but the very moment we “die” there, we wake up here! This life on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge is the real one. We find that our life on earth was just a dream, a dream designed to lead us further and further into love. True love grows and then cannot be destroyed. It grows and grows until it is stronger than death.”