What My Mother And I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break The Silence Quotes
"Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them."
"You are the one causing problems in my marriage, he says. You fucking bitch, he says. I’ll slam you, he says."
"Silence is what fills the gap between my mother and me."
"Good girls are quiet. Bad girls kneel on uncooked rice."
"Being able to be criticized—made fun of, even—is one of his admirable qualities."
"I needed a place to belong more than I even knew then. But the director knew."
"I am known for speaking when everyone else is silent, of saying the thing everyone is thinking but no one will say."
"I eat because I’m too smart for my own good, too sensitive, too queer, too Asian, too sad, too loud, too quiet, too angry, too fat."
"It wasn’t that bad. I knew I was lying to myself, and he was too."
"You could never lose me. I will love you every day of your life."
"I call. The borders around this conversation are like something hot was set down on the rest of the memory and it burned."
"Our family had passed through a season of hell, and this was what I’d done to survive it."
"Another disaster. I was her other hand; she needed me. I couldn’t be broken too."
"No one will believe this many bad things happened to one person."
"In the audience, as I finish reading from this novel, the world I hid from her now in these sentences, I find my mother’s eyes. She is smiling."
"The wives of my father’s friends do not iron shirts."
"My father teases me that when I grow up, I will get my PhD and take over his practice."
"The laundry room smells deliciously of wet wool, and it rumbles from the dryers."
"Questions I don’t ask my mother that night: Why don’t you dance every day?"
"The dancing mother goes into hiding, but three years later, on a spring Saturday, when I am eleven, my father and I blunder into the place where she once lived."
"The apartment has sun, and cats, and hanging plants. It has pink walls, like a stage set where the mother can dance."
"I’m fourteen in 1970 when we live in a suburb of New York called Larchmont."
"I promise you," she says. "The inside was nothing like the outside."
"Partly by cheating in French and math, I finish tenth grade."
"I knew the boy’s first and last name and had his telephone number."
"The last time I’d heard that pleading in your voice I was seventeen years old and my father had a gun to your head."
"By the time I was ten, I was my mother’s confessor."
"We want to start things off right—look for what we were missing, gather tools to help us succeed."
"A hypochondriac, I am terrified of pregnancy and its medical risks."
"I love babies, their chubby legs and concerned faces and pugilist’s fists."
"The older I got, the more complicated our relationship became."
"The house was crowded with sounds (the news at full volume, my mom yelling at my father)."
"You’re never going to pay back those student loans, and then, you know, your father and I are on the hook for them."
"You can’t just sit there," she said. "You have to find a job."
"Don’t think you can just stay here," she said to me one afternoon. "Don’t think you can just move in here and live in this house."
"You are a nightmare," I told her. "You’re ignorant and bitter and you and this house are a living nightmare."
"You’re selfish and stuck-up and you think everything belongs to you."
"You’re selfish," she said. "You’re selfish and stuck-up and you think everything belongs to you."
"It was satisfying, in its own way, to fulfill her expectations so neatly, knowing I’d never have to do it again."
"I believe that her pride in my accomplishments—and her love for me—is actively battling her resentment."
"Parenthood... the fear that I’ve learned less from my childhood than I should have, that I am more like her than I want to be."
"In between knowing something and refusing to know it lies a murky chasm."
"If you weren’t ashamed of it, you were taught to be."
"I wouldn’t give up my pacifier. She said that I carried it with me everywhere and sucked and sucked on it, wouldn’t let it out even to sleep."
"She had tried taking it from me when I took my bottle, but that I held it tight in my hand."
"The greatest protection the adult child of a borderline has is the ability to leave."
"I wish I had gotten to know her better. I think we would have been great friends."
"Oh Lord, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have BAD DREAMS."
"Their time together fascinated me—especially when they lived as hippies in Berkeley, trying to make their open marriage work—because I only knew my mother in the context of the ordinary days of my childhood, with NPR on the freeway commute and casseroles in the oven."
"To talk about her love for me, or mine for her, would feel almost tautological; she has always defined my notion of what love is."
"How many times has my mom picked up the phone to hear my voice cracked with tears, only letting it crack once I knew she was there?"
"My hunger for her feels endless. I want to love her more fully, by loving the woman she once was."
"They are broke and trying to figure out what to do about it. Is Peter going to get a job? Is he going to get a job that requires cutting his long hair?"
"Expression naturally gravitates toward difficulty. Narrative demands friction, and my mom and I live—by the day, the week, the decade—in closeness."
"My mom’s name isn’t Sheila. She hates the name Sheila. Her name is Joanne."
"The story allows their split to become an indelible part of them both: the origins myth of their ongoing relationship."
"It was an act of trust for Peter to send me his novel. Not only am I his ex-wife’s daughter—and thus, perhaps, a biased audience—but I’m also a writer, that particular species of vampire: one part barnacle, one part critic, always capable of betrayal."
"Despite all my other relationships, I have never stopped loving your mother."
"I reached into the open wound and brought the pain out like an eel wriggling on the end of a hook, hold it up, glory in it."