Cherise Wolas > Quotes

“Joan thinks then that writers have infinite choices and mothers nearly no choice at all.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“Joan Ashby is one of our most astonishing writers, a master of words whose profound characters slip free of the page...”
― Cherise Wolas

“All the ways in which women become mothers of some sort. Is motherhood inescapably entwined in female life, a story every woman ends up telling, whether or not she sought or desired that bond; her nourishment, her caretaking, her love, needed by someone standing before her, hands held out, heart demanding succor, commanding her not look away, but to dig deep, give of herself unstintingly, offer up everything she can?”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“... beware of finding yourself living an unintended life.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“The middle seat holds an old woman, teeny, not much bigger than a doll. She is creased and wrinkled and rheumy-eyed. Her eyes, though, beneath their cloudy scrim, sparkle like emeralds. And she is bright. She is very bright. Her cheeks rouged a happy pink. Her sweater a hot pink, the vibrant color masking the heavy load on her sloped, thin shoulders.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“I notice emotions the way others notice the weather”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“Thank you to Steve Iwanski and Turnrow Books for this fantastic review of THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY!!

Cherise Wolas' debut novel is a narrative tour-de-force. Never mind the admirable boldness of kicking it off with excerpts from (fictional) Joan Ashby's Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning story collections -- Wolas proceeds to delicately peel back the onion layers on Ashby's decades of retreat from the public eye. Like Lauren Groff in FATES AND FURIES, Wolas triumphs in depicting the mounting humiliations of domestic life like a psychological thriller. You know we're headed for the inevitable rug pull - and yet when it comes it still leaves you reeling. Forget about Joan Ashby; it's Cherise Wolas who will leave us waiting breathlessly for the next masterpiece.
—Steve Iwanski from Turnrow Books, Greenwood, MS”
― Cherise Wolas

“In the stories Joan wrote when she was Daniel’s age, she had murdered her characters, while Daniel had his one character facing down dangers and searching for answers. The genesis of the stories was clear to her: because Daniel felt loved and safe within his family, he could imagine himself taking risks, venturing out onto figurative limbs. He was lucky, Joan thought. She had only felt loved and safe within the worlds she created.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“We were young, and some of us were beautiful, and others of us were brilliant, and a few of us were both. Citizenship demanded only an ability to create, to use our minds and hands and bodies in unforeseen ways. We believed we knew more than those who had tried before us. Their experiment had failed, but their hard. Passionate, arrogant, certain we would not falter, or deceive, or betray ourselves, that we would not blacken our lives with whitewashed expectations, our presence here, in this arcadia, proved we had slipped the ropes and chains of expected, normal life. We considered everything. Except everything. By its very nature, everything resists corralling; it is far too expansive. You think you’ve avoided every last trap, but what you hadn’t considered, what you never could plan for, it is that which trips you up.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“Last words of wisdom. Whoever you were as a child, she's your future.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“She wonders when and how she decided it was sinful to heed her own destiny”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“When asked 'Do you think great things are ahead of you or behind you?' Harry had replied, 'The past no longer exists, there is only the future, whatever it may hold,' and something about his answer to that consideration of mystical simplicity has continued to give him pause”
― Cherise Wolas, The Family Tabor

“sworn your heard nothing”
― Cherise Wolas, The Family Tabor: A Novel

“He wants to cry out to them all that he’s lost, but an iciness is spreading through his insides, freezing the blood in his veins, and he is seeing only the darkness descending, the destruction when the truth about him comes to light.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Family Tabor

“A bright red car whizzes past. She is like that car, carrying herself with spangle and spark, but the strength that has long held her up is weakening.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Family Tabor

“In the main courtyard, the pool is a sapphire under the sun, shooting liquid rainbows into the house at oblique angles. How she adores submergence. She is a healer of human cracks and fissures, her days spent dealing with her patients struggles and agonies, the emotional and psychic often embodied in the physical. She uncovers all the states and syndromes that can spark and catch fire from infancy on, searing a being, those flames rarely sputtering out on their own. She works hard quenching the symptoms, providing parents with answers, and the toddlers, children, and teenagers with techniques to manage their frightening infernos, helping them douse the alarming heat and gain interior strength against what is burning them up.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Family Tabor

“His life has taken no detours, has not been delayed at all, moved forwardd as he wanted, every step exactly as he arranged.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“HOW DOES SHE KEEP HOPE ALIVE WHEN THIS SOLITARY EXISTENCE IS STUNTING HER AS SURELY AS THE RUBBER TREES STUNT THE FLOWERS WRIGGLING UP THROUGH THE DIRT, ONLY TO FIND THEMSELVES IN SHADE, THEIR PETALS CURLING, BROWNING, FALLING AWAY. DEATH COMES EARLY TO FLOWERS, TO MOST LIVING THINGS, WHEN THERE IS NO SUNLIGHT. IT’S NOT HARD FOR HER TO IMAGINE A SIMILAR OUTCOME FOR HERSELF IF LOVE AND MOTHERHOOD ESCAPE HER FOREVER.”
― Cherise Wolas

“In the park, the bright colors of the children's clothing, the timbre of their young voices, lowered and darkened.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“Critical to my understanding of myself was that my parents may have been storytellers, but I was the writer in my family, the only one who wrote his stories down.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

“...he must look away from it all and he stares up at the darkening sky, at the ribbons of fiery red dressing the mountains, at the white stars above starting to shine, at the blinking blue lights of a climbing plane. Palm Springs International Airport is nearby, but far enough away that the plane makes no sound at all, and Harry wonders where that soaring jet, that cylindrical tin balanced high up in the cold, dry stratosphere, is headed, who on board is happy, and who is not, who is heading toward something, and who is escaping, who, at the other end, will be greeted upon their arrival, and who will feel the solitariness of their lone and echoing footsteps.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Family Tabor

“Her failure to demand her needs, losing all of her years, sacrificing herself on the altar of motherhood to a son who saved himself from eternal extinction, to a son whose desperation she had missed.”
― Cherise Wolas, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby