The most important things are the hardest things to say

The most important things are the hardest things to say is a phrase that opens and closes the emotional arc of Gordon Lachance's memoir, serving as both a thematic epigraph and a final, rueful reflection on the limits of language. It appears first in the novel's opening paragraphs, where the adult Gordon, looking back on the summer of 1960, articulates a paradox that governs the entire story: the truths that shape a life are precisely those that resist being spoken. The expression returns near the end of the narrative, after Gordon has recounted the deaths of his three childhood friends and his own survival, reinforcing the idea that the deepest experiences—love, loss, terror, friendship—cannot be fully transmitted to another person through words alone.

The Paradox of Expression

The opening meditation establishes the expression as a philosophical claim about the nature of communication. Gordon explains that the most important things are "the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out." This is not merely a complaint about language's inadequacy but a recognition that the act of speaking reduces the infinite interior world to something finite and often disappointing. The expression further warns that even when a person dares to make a costly revelation, the listener may fail to understand: "you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it." The worst fate, Gordon concludes, is not the absence of a teller but "for want of an understanding ear."

The Expression as Narrative Frame

The phrase functions as a structural frame for the entire memoir. It appears in the first chapter, immediately before Gordon announces that he was "twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being," and it returns in the penultimate chapter, after he has described seeing used condoms floating in New York Harbor and being reminded of the burst leech from the beaver pond. In that later passage, Gordon explicitly connects the expression to his own practice as a writer: "The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that's why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings." The expression thus becomes a justification for the act of storytelling itself—a way of trying to make others care about the good things and the terrible things that have shaped a life, even though "it's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life."

The Deer and the Unspoken

The expression's truth is dramatized in a key scene that Gordon deliberately keeps secret from his friends. After waking at dawn on the second day of their journey, he sees a deer standing on the railroad tracks not ten yards away. The encounter is wordless, serene, and deeply personal: "We looked at each other for a long time… I think it was a long time. Then she turned and walked off to the other side of the tracks, white bobtail flipping insouciantly." Gordon never tells Chris, Teddy, or Vern about the deer. He reflects that "that was one thing I kept to myself. I've never spoken or written of it until just now, today. And I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential." The deer—a moment of pure, unmediated grace—becomes the ultimate example of the expression's claim: the most important things are the hardest to say, and when they are said, they lose their power.

The Expression and the Reader

The expression also implicates the reader in its paradox. Gordon directly addresses the reader as "Gentle Reader" and acknowledges that the story he is telling—the story of four boys who walked twenty miles to see a dead body—may seem trivial or melodramatic. He admits that "the world has seen one or two better stories" and that his own early writing was "painfully derivative and painfully sophomoric." Yet the expression insists that the value of a story lies not in its novelty or literary merit but in its fidelity to the unsayable truths of lived experience. By framing his memoir with this expression, Gordon asks the reader to listen for what cannot be said directly—the love that has teeth, the wounds that never close, the friends who drown—and to understand that the words themselves are only a shadow of the reality they attempt to capture.