Roxana Robinson > Quotes

“A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able to vibrate in synchrony with something deep and powerful. If we’re lucky we’ll transmit a strong pure note, one that isn’t ours, but which passes through us. If we’re lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.”
― Roxana Robinson

“Grief was an actual weight, he thought. It felt like a physical burden. You carried it with you all day, unsheddable. Your shoulders, by nightfall, felt dragged down." p 320”
― Roxana Robinson, This is My Daughter

“The crimes you paid for as a parent: excruciating, to be blamed for something you'd never dreamt of doing, or huring someone you'd give your heart's blood to...One thing you learned as a parent was humility.”
― Roxana Robinson, Cost

“Being a mother is paying it forward, sending that energy and feeling to someone who needed it at first to survive, but who, the older she becomes, needs you less. The older you become, the more irrelevant you are. Chapter”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“The justification for leaving a marriage was that you were increasing the sum of happiness in the world. You were ending your own unhappiness, and your spouse’s (if you weren’t happy, your spouse couldn’t really be happy, either), and he or she would find real happiness elsewhere. The children had only known an unhappy marriage. Now they would learn what happy parents are like, and they would become happier, and able to create happy marriages themselves. But actually all this is false and self-serving. The only person whose happiness is increased is the departing spouse. There are no moral grounds for leaving a marriage. You are breaking your vow and causing pain to others. It is selfish, cruel, and dishonorable. How could he have lived with that?”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“You were not in charge of your body. Your body was in charge of you.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“His absence is the largest thing in her life; she has to live around it.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“children take no responsibility for their limbs; it’s like dressing a noodle.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Aunt Hattie, when you wrote that book, I imagine you were thinking of something radical: the abolition of slavery itself. You were only one small woman, and you were looking up at an enormous edifice, towering and monolithic, but what you wrote made the whole structure start to tremble and shudder, and finally, it all came down, thundering and crashing. It wasn't just because of your book, of course, but your book made it impossible for people to think of slavery in the old way.”
― Roxana Robinson, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“Rage was an essential part of slavery. Rage will allow us to forget our own humanity. Without rage, we will recognize another person as like ourselves. It's hard to hurt someone you're not angry at; it's anger that drives the impulse to harm. Rage declares itself through violence, and violence was the platform on which slavery was built. We feel rage when we feel separate; we feel compassion when we feel connected.”
― Roxana Robinson, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

“In Europe they put community first; now in America it was the self. Your own happiness should be paramount. Honor was not considered.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“The older you become, the more irrelevant you are.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“He couldn't fit the two things together. It gave him a jagged, unfinished feeling, like the first pinprick of heartbreak, a tiny pointed lance of light beaming on something you can't bear to see, can't bring yourself to look at, can't look away from.”
― Roxana Robinson, Sparta

“It was like hearing customs from an undiscoverd race: what men thought was unimaginable....She wondered if all human activity were like this, everything, every gesture, every comment colored faintly by gender. Each side continually astonished, confused by the other's misperceptions. p 133”
― Roxana Robinson, This is My Daughter

“The dog belongs to a small devotional cult that is entirely dedicated to Sarah. The dog is the only member.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“But do we want to do more dead white males?” Nancy Wilson asks. She’s Sarah’s friend. “Dead white Anglo-Saxon males?” “They did do a lot of things well. We can’t just exclude them all now that we’re feminists,” says Shirley.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“She's my retirement gift, the platinum watch for being a mother." " This fortunate position - the one you couldn't apply for - is one you can't lose either. It's yours for life: this will always be your daughter's daughter. These two will always be yours, and you, theirs. I'll always be her Nana.”
― Roxana Robinson

“stands and puts on his shirt. His chest is still damp from shaving,”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“a good model if you want to establish a global empire. Maybe not so good if you’re part of a family.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Being a mother is paying it forward, sending that energy and feeling to someone who needed it at first to survive, but who, the older she becomes, needs you less. The older you become, the more irrelevant you are.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving: A Novel

“Living with Bella is like having a familiar, a small unpredictable spirit who knows you intimately,”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“famously unconventional.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“womanly landmarks—waist, breasts, hips—had slid into insignificance.”
― Roxana Robinson, Cost

“Kat is still not speaking to him. Warren has left many messages.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“It was her “kind of nerve,” her ability to transcend her fears, of all sorts, that marked her.”
― Roxana Robinson, Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life

“It feels safer to keep her secrets to herself. While her marriage was failing she told no one. She was ashamed; it seemed like her fault.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“The existence of the family depends on his reliability. His integrity.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“When that time comes, will your child set you on the ice floe, or bring you in beside her hearth?”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“She imagines tantrums and boredom, doleful requests for their mother. But it would be lovely,”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Before you have any kids the idea of them is so peripheral. Then it was just something to worry about—getting pregnant had nothing to do with children, it had to do with us. Even when I got married I put it off, having kids.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving