Quotes from Beth Ann Fennelly

Motherhood makes you stronger even as it makes you weaker. Your new sensitivity is a strength, and you should see it that way.

Already I was learning that some of the things I was learning weren't things I'd need to know.

I stopped trying to rank sorrow, realized that the world has sorrow enough for all of us, and when some of it falls to you the best hope you have is letting yourself suffer through it.

Whether you're explaining where pets go when they die or teaching your child to recycle, your philosophies have ramifications. For the rest of history, echos of your voice will be heard.

But remember that reading provides nourishment for hungers we might not even be aware of. How often have I chosen a book at random and found in it an answer I didn't realize I was seeking.

When sharing your news, you might come across some disgruntled parent-folk. You know, the kind who snort and say ruefully, "If there's anyplace you want to travel to, go now." Don't let them squelch your joy, dear K: these are the kind of people who never went anywhere before they had babies either.

Both a baby and a poem masquerade as something we've created, when we know that they arrive from somewhere beyond us, that they are gifts.

She reads his poems gratefully in her small Mississippi town. It's an undramatic life, yet these past months she seems to have found the intensity he yearns for, This also sounds like bragging, though she doesn't mean it to. If she could, she'd let him bear her secret. She'd let all great men bear it, for s few hours. Then, when she too it back, they'd remember how it feels to be inhabited.

You've just read of a woman remembering an orange thrown through a window, without knowing why she remembers this. You will either remember reading this and know why you remember reading this, or you will remember reading this and not know why you remember reading this, or you will not remember reading this, possibly forever.

And Lord did I push, for thee more hours I pushed, I pushed so hard I shat, Pushed so hard blood vessels burst in my neck and in my chest, pushed so hard my asshole turned inside-out like a rosebud.

On another note - Sarton writes about "people in their thirties mourning their lost youth because we have given them no ethos that makes maturity appear an asset." I very much feel this to be true. Turning twenty-one is the nadir of American achievement, one can get smashed legally, and as there are no further milestones after that, each succeeding birthday reeks of diminishment. People start to lie about their age, as if maturity is a thing to be ashamed of.

With toddlers around, times are always interesting.

I would not be okay for so long that when okay arrived it couldn't place me.

I love to sing! I think nearly everyone does....We are rhythmical animals, from our heartbeats to our cycles of eating and sleeping, and when we create rhythms, we're in harmony with our bodies.

But the process of birthing Claire changed what I wanted to write about. It left me feeling betrayed that I'd been unprepared for the pure animal nature of birth. For the first time, I understood myself to be a mammal with a mammal's instincts and desires beneath the veneer of civilization - a mammal just as much as the opossum with its thirteen nipples.

When you push your stroller past a group of elderly women, you'll see in the turning gladness of their bodies a glimpse of the children they had been, turning toward the tin music of the ice cream van.

I stopped trying to tank sorrow, realized that the world has sorrow enough for all of us, and when some of it falls to you the best hope you have is letting yourself suffer through it. I suffered through it. I suffer through it.

When I'm alone in nature as I am now, I marvel that I ever let a day go by when I'm not in nature as I am now. But the truth is, not only days but whole months go by between immersions. How can that be, when I feel so recharged here?

I don't remember what we ate or drank or discussed, I remember only the long table filled with high-spirited bohemians—intellectuals, internationals, the great unwashed—and how I yearned to be one of them.

That hen became our pet. The kids fed her Cheetos. We even competed to name her. Beyoncé is not what I'd have chosen, but we'd agreed before setting out Monopoly that the winner got naming rights, and Thomas had a hotel on Park Place.

MOMMY WANTS A GLASS OF CHARDONNAY If you collected all the drops of days I've spent singing "Row, row, row your boat" to children fighting sleep, you'd have an ocean deep enough to drown them many times over.