Megan Mayhew Bergman > Quotes

“Mothers, I believe, intoxicate us. We idolize them and take them for granted. We hate them and blame them and exalt them more thoroughly than anyone else in our lives. We sift through the evidence of their love, reassure ourselves of their affection and its biological genesis. We can steal and lie and leave and they will love us.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“I wanted, then, to become what I most admired, what now seemed most real to me. I wanted to be that exalted, complicated presence in someone's life, the familiar body, the source of another's existence. But I knew what I wanted was not always what I needed.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“I want to mother the world, I thought. I have so much love.
Then—I have no business being a mother. I am a selfish woman.
Then—I can do this. Millions of women have been mothers.
Then—I feel very alone. I do not know what I'm capable of.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“Sometimes you didn't know what you were after, I thought. Maybe there was a speck on the horizon and you followed it, hoping for the best.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“I knew I was waiting for someone I didn't understand.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“I remember thinking that moms were not allowed to be sad, that surely women grew out of sadness by the time they had children.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“It was a character-building week, a week that thinned my hair, put circles underneath my eyes.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“Sometimes it helps to lie. You tell yourself a story, even if you don't know the ending.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman

“I don't want him to know that people like Louis's mom exist, that people fall into land mines of pain and can't crawl back out.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“Imagine: you could say nothing, do nothing, eat nothing, touch nothing, love nothing without the other knowing.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“Would there be water shortages? Yes. More starving babies? Unfortunately. Would our quality of life soon be diminished by global warming? Probably. But who, I wondered, but the strongest among us could hold those ideas in their heads and find happiness? Get out of bed in the morning?”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“I'm hungry for you. Old you, new you.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“Maybe the world had been bad to its great and unusual women. Maybe there wasn’t a worthy place for the female hero to live out her golden years, to be celebrated as the men had been celebrated, to take from that celebration what she needed to survive.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“I pictured the mother whale, exhausted from labor, pushing her calf up to the skin of the water. The miracle of breath in the face of predation, life in the wake of whaling ships.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“We are, I think, eager to show mettle we don’t yet have.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“Nothing has topped the way men shake her hand and look her in the eye, what it’s like to call a man chickenshit to his face and get away with it, to mean it, to feel free and dominant and in control of your life.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“I want him to know nothing but gentle landings.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“Power is a funny thing. Sometimes you can just take it.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“Worrying about parents is a waste of time. It’s your life. Let’s have a martini.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“There were no promises, no obligations between living things, she thought. Not even humans. Just raw need hidden by a game of make-believe.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

“That was a strange and important gift, to know that the world was as fucked-up and lonely as it seemed. That a woman gathered pain and taught herself to bear it along the way.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, How Strange a Season

“What I know now: the body is a strange vessel we leave behind.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“Her body was more than burned flesh. Donating it to science was about taking control of the thing that was undeniably hers. Had”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“What was forgivable? Marie wondered. It seemed to her that adulthood was a series of mundane years punctuated by transgressions and apologies. If you didn’t transgress, you died of boredom.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, How Strange a Season

“Dolly was the exclamation point in my life. She made me feel things: adoration, anger, frustration. She was always in love and it made her glow.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories