Amy Shearn > Quotes

“You have to live your story before being able to write your story.”
― Amy Shearn

“...it had occurred to me that this whole having-children situation was essentially a process of unspooling. Once [my child] had been so close to me that her feet had gotten stuck in my ribs. We lived literally tethered. And then she was born and screamed if she wasn't being nursed or held. But with each day, she unspooled a little farther away--rolling over, eating food, sitting, walking, screaming, 'Go away, Mommy!'--the crimson thread connecting us unraveling more and more as she wandered out into the woods of the world.”
― Amy Shearn, The Mermaid of Brooklyn

“All the fathers of their generation had to do to count as “good parents” was to express a feeling now and then, as their own fathers never had. All the mothers had to do was everything.”
― Amy Shearn, Animal Instinct

“It helped to have friends in the same stage as you. They made you make sense; they provided both camaraderie and context. Everyone knew this; it wasn’t some existential mystery. It was why she’d lost friends when she got married, why she’d gone cold to their couple friends who got divorced before she did. You didn’t mean to. You didn’t consciously decide you couldn’t be friends anymore or should drift apart. It just sort of happened.”
― Amy Shearn, Animal Instinct

“Being desired was not at all the same as being loved or even known.”
― Amy Shearn, Animal Instinct

“Part of being a person is being very stupid, and doing things that don't make sense. You can love someone — but you can never control them, and they will randomly do something cruel, or stupid, and hurt you, sometimes inadvertently, but sometimes on purpose. People are untrustworthy.”
― Amy Shearn, Animal Instinct