Beth Ann Fennelly > Quotes

“Already I was learning that some of the things I was learning weren’t things I’d need to know.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“Do you remember in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! when the Grinch is alone on the mountain after plundering the Christmas of the Whos down below, and his heart swells to three times its normal size? That's the other thing that happens when you become a mom. You feel more deeply. You become capable of a raw, scary fullness of emotion that tenderizes the hardened muscle of the heart. And it endangers you. Because you feel for other people's suffering more than you used to, especially for the suffering of children, as if the love you bear for your child is so outsized that it can't be contained but splashes out into the world, your salty tears brimming the salty oceans.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“Motherhood makes you stronger even as it makes you weaker. Your new sensitivity is a strength, and you should see it that way.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“...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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“Time and again I've been in a group of people in their forties, fifties, and up who, when talk turns to aging, make the typical lamentations, but sometimes, later, softly, confess that they prefer their lives now, prefer themselves now. This secret is kept from those who need to hear it - the despairing young. Movies certainly don't spoil the secret - how rarely they present a middle-aged woman falling in love, for example, or living by herself in any kind of creative and productive way. What I want you to know: so far, it just gets better.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“I would not be okay for so long that when okay arrived it couldn’t place me.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Unmentionables: Poems

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“There are too many people out there who think their way is the right way, which it might be-- and their way is the only way, which it is not.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“With toddlers around, times are always interesting.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly

“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?”
― Beth Ann Fennelly

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“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.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother