Motherthing Quotes
"I know it’s got marshmallows. Isn’t that enough?"
"He looked up, seized so completely by her bottomless brown eyes that the waiting room’s relentless torments evaporated completely."
"Humans like to put their mouths on the things they love."
"Perfect body temperature, thick enough to hold you."
"The ceaseless squeal of their bloody boots against the hardwood, the hymnal repetition of their internal communications."
"But then the doctors finally emerge to tell us that they haven’t managed to save her."
"I burrow beneath his arm and he pulls me into him, my length along his, ear against his chest."
"It would make everything better. I could say it and it would make everything better."
"I open the pantry, all of her cleaning products on the bottom shelf."
"Tomorrow Ralph will be a man raised by the wildflowers and critters of the forest."
"He screamed, CALL AN AMBULANCE! So I did, right away, without asking, without thinking."
"Ralph and I, we were going to have a baby soon. Soon, soon, soon."
"A short while later a team of paramedics marched in and, with the orderly calm of ants, strapped her to a gurney."
"We both shatter in the freezing cold, confused and isolated as Martians, just landed and groping for truth."
"She loved her rituals and her charms and I was hoping that I would go with her and she’d win lots of money and she’d love me as much as one of her grinning, big-bellied troll dolls."
"Maybe touching someone is the kindest thing you can do; making a person feel like it’s okay to touch them, that they’re touchable and not disgusting, is the easiest and best way to make a person feel good in the world."
"I love to think about our first night together, back at his place after the bar. His apartment was small and clean and organized and easy to be in."
"Life isn’t so bad when you do it the way that Ralph taught me, learning from him, slowly untangling all the bad habits from my mother."
"All a person really needs is to feel unconditionally loved," he said. "It’s built into our programming, a biological necessity, the species couldn’t survive without it."
"Aren’t we like that though?" I asked him, wanting to cry, thinking of my most private, shameful thoughts. "Aren’t we all monsters filled with pain?"
"You’ve got to have a will to live, don’t you? Something’s got to happen when you don’t have one anymore, right?"
"Because I’m dead. I’m dead and it’s going to kill you too, living with me, being with me, every day we’re living together in this house is killing you too."
"Not happy about a baby, about our pure love baby, Cal, who might save the world one day, who would transform us into our final forms: Mom and Dad, two people who’d had more love than they could handle, sick with it in fact, because too much of anything eventually becomes poison."
"We’ll need nothing from her," he’d said, "not ever, only giving her everything, always."
"If you know you’ve got them and you know what they are, you won’t give them to anyone else."
"You’re still young and you’re beautiful and funny and—you’re going to be a great mother one day, the best."
"Never alone, never ever alone, never ever alone."
"You work hard, you are hard, enjoy a nice hard drink."
"I’m not sleeping well. I’m not eating good things from The Book."
"Many infants are born with a tendency to rickets because of the faulty diet of the mother."
"A healthy, full-blooded woman should not be allowed to satisfy all her whims in her desire for harmful foods."
"I’ll have earned at least a bit of a hangover tomorrow, that’s for sure."
"I stand up, the kitchen chair grinds against the linoleum. I’m even drunker than I thought."
"We spend a lot of nights there," she says. "It’s easier to connect with the dead when you’re present for their passing."
"I’m sorry, I can’t tell you any more than I already have. I don’t know any more."
"She’d rather see her son dead with her than alive with you."
"She claims that you accused her of abandoning her mother, that you willfully agitated Mrs. Bondy, and that you wouldn’t leave when politely asked to. Is that about right?"
"The loved ones of our clients aren’t always on their best behavior."
"I know you and Mrs. Bondy are close, but her daughter calls the shots now."
"Imagine jumping off a building and then time all but stops, and you’re falling so slowly, regretting having jumped."
"I’m going to remove you from Mrs. Bondy’s care strategy."
"She’s been like a mother to me, she really has."
"The truth is, my mother is a cold, calculating crook."
"You’re the one who made things bad. Which Abby would never have done."
"I want to say that I’m sorry. I’m just, I’m really fucking sorry, Abby."
"That’s a good omen, seeing an eyeball. Means someone’s looking out for you two."