Claire Oshetsky > Quotes

“I prefer to speak in metaphor: That way, no logic can trap me, and no rule can bind me, and no fact can limit me or decide for me what’s possible.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“Housekeeping is nothing more than a losing encounter with entropy.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“We're the oldest love triangle in the world: mother, father, child.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“I begin to understand what a gift I've been given, to have been chosen for this task. The truth overwhelms me, and humbles me. The birds are telling me that my life's work, as your mother, will be to teach you how to be yourself- and to honor however much of the wild world you have in you, owl-baby- rather than mold you to be what I want you to be, or what your father wants you to be.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“Time moves sideways through the most important moments of our lives.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“Is life nothing more than a continuous retreat from our true selves, as we're hammered into shape by special schools and social cues?”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“Even in the most terrible chapters of my life I have always known a certain, savage beauty— in the color of the sky, the sense of birds flying close to my ear, the feel of the soft-loam earth and the joy of running through the untended woods until I became more animal than spirit.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“So. This is motherhood. I ponder it. I ponder the lonely, cruel, relentless obligation of motherhood. I ponder the loving, soft, yielding wonder of motherhood. I ponder the mystery of who you are, little stranger, and who you will become...

I love you. I love you. To habituate myself to the idea of loving you, I say it many times. You're ugly. I tried not to think that last thought, but the thought snuck in. It was easier to love you before you were born. I'm afraid of you. You disgust me. I've made a terrible mistake.

I'm your mother.
I chose it.
I love you.

I remind myself that all firstborn things are hideously ugly. We sit and rock together until it grows dark all around. At some point, there in the dark, after staring at you for so long, and after it gets so dark in this room that I can't see you at all, you become very beautiful to me, and I say yes to being your mother.
I say: yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
Why do I say yes? I'll never know.
It could be of my own free will.
It could be that you've injected me with your little talon. It could be that your talon is dipped in the poison of mother-love.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“She has just learned that some things are forever, and other things are never-again.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“And I thought: This is love. Oh, I know it wasn't like man-woman love. I know the difference. It wasn't big. It wasn't forced. It had no hurt in it. It was small and gentle and good. It asked nothing. It only gave.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“But moments of pure astonishment are a fleeting gift, impossible for humans to hang on to - just like moments of pure grief, or pure rage, or any other kind of pure feeling - all of them dissipate and disappear, as quick as they came...”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“Is this what it means to be a mother, then? To be in constant, irrational conflict with one's own child? To be constantly challenged by the stubborn will of a creature who doesn't respond to logic or reason, and who always wins?”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“Every time she took it out it was because she meant to get rid of it once and for all. But then she would think, why not read it one more time, and when she was done, she would look down and see her hands putting the letter safely away, back in her pocketbook. This time she promised herself to throw it away for sure.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“You're my fate and you're my dire necessity. You're my refuge when I'm lost, and losing you would kill me. Your flights and falls are dreamlike and perfect and I'm blessed to be the one to witness them.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“Penny's story is more tragic than mine because there is very little goodness or love in it. Even in the most terrible chapters of my life I have always known a certain, savage beauty - in the color of the sky, the sense of birds flying close to my ear, the feel of the soft-loam earth and the joy of running through the untended woods until I become more animal than spirit.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“There was a false note in Maarten De Smedt's voice. Margaret heard it. She had just in that instant grown old enough to hear falseness in the voices of adults.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“On this day the girl feels so much love pouring out of her mother that she is certain her mother has the power to save her. Soon she will come to understand she can't be saved.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“When I finally did find a way to untie that impossible knot, then all the most important questions in life would be answered. Why we love. Why we suffer. How we make sense of the happenings in our lives. The stories we tell ourselves to make it through to the next day. Why we press on, even after all hope is lost.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“Every day you wrench me toward a different world altogether: an older world, filled with wild, perfect creatures, singing in the dark.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“And on the day that you are born- on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box- I won't have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“... and I thought about all three of those women at once, and how different they were from one another, and yet, not so different.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“I wonder how long I’ve been the victim of subliminal messaging from a fetus. I wonder if it goes this way for all pregnant mothers: At first we fully recognize the existential threat that is growing inside us, but gradually evolutionary imperatives overcome the conscious mind’s objection, and the will to reproduce overcomes the will to survive, and the needs of the baby overcome the needs of the host, until the only choice left for us women is to be willing, happy participants in our own destruction.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“Maybe I resent you a little.
Once this first small thought of maybe-resentment creeps in, it acts like a fast poison.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“It moved the kindhearted teacher that this dull-eyed girl was working so hard to make something happen on a piece of paper, something that looked like writing, and she remembered why she had become a teacher in the first place. It wasn't just because no one had wanted to marry her. It was also because she had felt a calling. She was remembering the calling now, like a distant dream.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“No one would ever call Agnes beautiful. She is more like an arrow, aimed in a magnificent direction.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“She worried her sister would die. Or that her sister would linger. None of these outcomes seemed fair to her.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“It seemed to Miss Rudnicki that all the sadness and violence of the world were reflected in that small hand.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“My mother didn’t answer. She gestured mutely toward her feet. Is it true that her long toes were burying themselves in the ground, so deeply that she could no longer take a step? Do I honestly remember seeing her two feet rooting themselves to the spot? Did her skin really become hard and rough all over, like a tree? Were there really spring-green leaves spilling forth from her fingertips? Or has my adult mind painted the memory of this night in such unlikely colors, as a way to assuage my guilt for leaving her? I could hear men shouting and dogs barking, coming closer. Ahead I could see the tangled thicket. The wind in the trees sounded like the voices of women singing in chorus, and their voices were filled with glottal embellishments, as if sung by throats made of wood. The music urged me forward. And so I left my mother, and went on without her. I wasn’t afraid, because the trees took care of me, and they brooded and bent over me, and sang to me their melancholy songs, and fed me, and gave me succor, until the Bird of the Wood found me and took me home with her and taught me to trust to the sound of my own voice."

From Chouette by Claire Oshetsky

Virago: November 4, 2021
Ecco: November 16, 2021”
― Claire Oshetsky

“She loves her next-door neighbor, Ruby Bickford, and doesn't know it, because such a love lies just outside the window of Florence's imagination.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer

“Her change of thinking came about because her teacher had just called her REMARKABLE.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer