Rowan Beaird > Quotes

“Still, she began to feel stronger. As if a spirit, not of someone dead but of someone yet to be, were passing through her.”
― Rowan Beaird, The Divorcées: A Novel

“Inside, she counts each of the twenty-dollar bills, making sure it’s everything she left with, everything her father had given her in order to make it through the next six weeks and back home, now that she’s dependent on him again. Folding the paper seal, she tucks it beneath her mattress like a sin.”
― Rowan Beaird, The Divorcées: A Novel

“There are pitfalls on every side. There is, for example, the constant danger that the girls will go wild.”
― Rowan Beaird, The Divorcées: A Novel

“Lois’s mother hated Polish food, saying it reminded her of her grandmother’s tiny hovel of an apartment in Portage Park, rancid with herring and vinegar. This drove Lois’s father mad. Sometimes, when they were particularly angry with one another, he would bring home the kielbasa his mother always made for him as a child for Ela to fry up, and eat several of them at the dinner table without pausing for breath, as Lois’s mother quietly speared the pale, wet cucumbers on her salad plate. This is how Lois first conceived of marriage: as a poorly played chess game no one ever seems to win.”
― Rowan Beaird, The Divorcées: A Novel

“When she made the decision to leave Lawrence—the day she found out she wasn’t pregnant, seven weeks after he buried her diaphragm in the trash—her mind refused to think she would have to return to her childhood home. She hated being a wife, was terrified of becoming a mother, but she couldn’t stomach the idea of once again being only a daughter. Each role an ill-fitting dress. Still, she didn’t know what shape a life outside of Lake Forest could take. She could only see pulses from films: drunken evenings in grand ballrooms, strangers and strange cities, a lipstick mark left on a napkin, on someone’s throat. Scenes electric with desire. Scenes too dramatic to be real. And then one she could not place: Lois peeling a sheet from her newspaper for a person seated across from her at a diner, their silence as comfortable as a warm bath.”
― Rowan Beaird, The Divorcées: A Novel

“I’ve done what I could, but sometimes people prefer to stay where it’s safe, to stick to what they know, even when what they know is a prison.”
― Rowan Beaird, The Divorcées: A Novel

“It’s not that they act like men, but like girls when no men are present.”
― Rowan Beaird, The Divorcées: A Novel