Maureen > Recent Status Updates

“I knew she loved us in the way that she could.”

“I think I was insecure and looking for validation. ..I think I liked that he liked me, more than anything.”

“…a preemptive, numbing ‘No’ to whatever the world wanted to show her next.”

“Yeah, but Cricket…dreams can change.”
“…because circumstances change.”

“She didn’t need Peter’s help, she just wanted him to support her decision. Why did she as always need to be reassured? She was sixty-three, too old to be afraid of making mistakes.”

“How are you supposed to deal with the fact that you could live to be a hundred or four five more minutes?”

N ow I understand how hard it is to find a starting place, how heavy our hearts are, how exhausted we are.

“You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.”

“He had made it his responsibility that none of the people he loved would die.”

“So this was having a family: you might mean well but hurt them anyway, they had reactions and felt disappointments you couldn’t predict.”

“ There were some things you never got over. No amount of thinking or talking would make them right: the best you could do was find a way to live alongside them. And goose would have given anything to be back on the lake with his sisters. In the end we’re given so few people to love and they were his.”

Strong 4.5. End of the world (fluids/climate change) type…so well-written, thought-provoking.

“Time only pushes wounds aside. Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss.”

the past is quicksand and the future is unknowable, but in the present you get to float. Nothing is missing, nothing is hypothetical.

“Rhys Kinnick nearly doubled over with a previously undiagnosed condition: regret. And this single, overwhelming thought: What have I done?”

“I know you think of me as your mother only, but please remember, inside I am also just a girl.”

“…do you know what it feels like when your worst fear, your very worst fear, comes to pass? When the imagined terror comes true?”

“Saint knew that for some it was written in the stars that no matter how hard they fought their road did not lead somewhere good.”

“Patch knew there were moments when you made your bad decision even when you were fully aware of what would come.”

“Saint remembered a time when contentment had settled over her each night like a comforter.”

“…for quiet people, raised voices are experienced as a kind of aggression even when directed elsewhere.”

I enjoyed this very much!

“The writer writes the words. The given reader reads the words. And the book, the unique and unrepeatable book, doesn’t exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.”

A good story, though not my favorite of hers.

“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.” W.S. Merwin

“If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn’t bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well.”

“Her mother was a woman whose grudges had grudges.”

Mission statement truths!