Quotes from Kate Manning

Shush sweet baby, I said, so tired, and mixed her gripe water with whiskey and dill weed, but it did no good, so I seen now why lullabies was all about cradles falling from trees, oh dear, when the wind blows, down will come baby, whoops too bad, but at least it's quiet.

Because I couldn't trust anything, especially not myself. How could I be lying there next to him with these snakes of doubt worming around in my heart? It was not honest.

In this time, I learned for myself as my teacher predicted, how it is these two extremes - that we are transported by love and jailed by it - that are ever impossible for mothers to reconcile.

My new tune, of spite and indifference, drowned out the truth: that I'd mistaken the burn of jealousy for love. The heart wants what it is most denied, a hard lesson.

Lust was a weed, a nightshade vine, a nettle, impossible to uproot as the mugwort I pulled in the fields of Illinois, so while in the daylight I was a flower of virtuous resolution, at night I was motherless in a cold kitchen, starved for the warm arms of a sweetheart and pretty words of approval.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. —Mary Harris "Mother" Jones

You could eat the air in the place, so thick with bread and warmth that it stang our cheeks.

Those who would learn must suffer.

In this life, all we have is our savior and the honest word.

Freedom is our strength but comes with responsibility, went my thinking; it had to be tended and fed, or some such lofty idealism in a schoolgirl's musing.

I pressed down warnings and hopes, so my lungs were tight, and learned then why desire is called a crush. To be crushed. I would die of it.

The crush of it. So this is it. Love swallowed by mistake or circumstance. Romance and the moon conspired to make a summer fool of me.

I don't want to get lost." "No, no, no, sweet, you won't. If you get lost, I'll find you.

Even now I cling to the idea that amour fou, curdled as it was, still had me in its grip. I want to believe this. If you do not act out of some form of love, then who are you in the world?

Lost love is still love, isn't it.