Lisl Fair > Lisl's Quotes

“How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe?
How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“I could not get my fill of looking.
There should be a song for women to sing at this moment or a prayer to recite. But perhaps there is none because there are no words strong enough to name that moment.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“...moms, even good ones, sometimes lose it a little so as not to lose it all.”
― Susan Squire

“You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.”
― Elissa Schappell, Blueprints for Building Better Girls

“What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...

I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant 'storm.' The smell of fire taht meant 'Flee.' The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about these things?

And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.”
― Amy Tan

“Whatever life brings, we'll share," she says, and "I can do no more than the best I can.”
― Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog

“If you aren’t nurturing your self, what kind of mother can you be, anyway?”
― Sandra Scofield

“A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor--it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.”
― Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

“In the cherry blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger.”
― Kobayashi Issa