No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn’t.
But it seemed to me that this was the way we all lived: full to the brim with gratitude and joy one day, wrecked on the rocks the next. Finding the balance between the two was the art and the salvation.
Sometimes you know before you know.
Do you think that people ever really do believe they will die, that the world will just go along as always without them? I wonder if we aren’t all a little surprised at the moment of crossover, if we don’t look back over our shoulders saying, Now hold on.
As a writer, you should have a sticky soul; the act of continually taking things in should be as much a part of you as your hair color.
My inside self and my outside self used to match. A compass needle pointed true north. Now the needle spins around and around indicating the sad direction of nowhere.
How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything.
My mind was in my heart, anchored like a bright kite in a safe place.
One thing I have always been is too short. It’s adorable when you’re in junior high. After that, it’s a pain in the ass for the rest of your life.
He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the good place, and a heart-shaped leaf lay trapped in the hollow if his throat as though it were planned, though of course it was so perfect it couldn’t have been planned.
It seems like people are all the time making themselves themselves, but they don’t really know it. You can only have true vision when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being something they never really intended. I wonder if you can truly resurrect your own self.
Outside, the rain sometimes comes down so hard, we have to talk louder, and it feels like a miracle that the roof holds. It makes for a coziness and a gratefulness, too, that you have the choice to not be out in it. You can sit at the table and look out the window and not have to feel what you see.
Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar.
Sometimes I try to remember things my mother told me about the awful way he was raised. But why does he have to keep on going? Why would you take something bad out of your mouth and hand it to another, saying, Here, eat this?
The truth is, we usually only show our unhappiness to another woman. I suppose this is one of our problems. And yet it is also one of our strengths.
I hate banana bread. It’s too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs.
I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.
I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I’m not talking Santa, here, either.
Ruth has friends like other people have wardrobes. I mean that there’s someone for every occasion.
I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.