Dan > Dan's Quotes

“because I know the difference between preaching and anesthesia.”
― Monica Wood, Any Bitter Thing

“Maybe he, like Mum, believed God had delivered three extra children, one-two-three, as a sign of His plan for this couple's long, long friendship. But God had also delivered to him the Oxford Paper Company, and the foamy river it sat upon. And the long working hours it required. And the poison it put in the air. Three more girls from God might portend a long married life, but a multi-acre paper mill, with much heat but no heart, could make for still competition if it decided to bestow the opposite.
Maybe it was the work.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“The packet of fading photos gives it away if you know how to look: always a rundown porch landing and stair rails behind, always a child squinting into strong sunlight and a grim-faced adult skulking in shadow. What must it have been like to grow up in that silence?”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“I’d remembered Omer and Brownie as an homage to Mr. and Mrs. Vaillancourt, who were made for each other and called each other “honey” and kissed right in front of us sometimes. I’d remembered a jaunty story about a lady duck who falls in love, despairs when her beloved swims briefly away, then rejoices upon his return. They thought it was about them. I thought it was about them. But really it was about me and Mr. Vaillancourt. And really really, it was about me and Dad. Or maybe it was about loss itself—of people, livelihood, love—the things we lose and manage to find again. This is what it is to be twelve, or thirty, or fifty-five: to look back, with new eyes, on what you did not know you knew.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“In they went, over the footbridges to mills flourishing on Chisholm land. “To the Rumford Falls Paper Company, which made—?” “Newsprint!” “And the Rumford Falls Sulphite Company?” “Sulphite pulp!” “And the International Paper Company?” “Manila, envelope paper, newsprint, and writing paper!” “And the Continental Paper and Bag Company?” “Bags and envelopes!” And finally, on the land where the river made its elbow bend into Mexico, the Oxford Paper Company, Hugh’s ruby of modern papermaking, an innovation that eventually enfolded its sister mills and met what its”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“I read with a kind of curious terror, learning that words can pin their readers to place, confer permanence on the ethereal, make the unimaginable true.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“I have always loved books for their reassuring heft, for their promise of new words, for their air of mystery, for their characters who lived in them, for the sublime pleasure of disappearing. But not until now, at the threshold of this perilous summer, have I ever turned to storybooks for instruction.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“The shape of our family has been upended and rearranged, its roof flattened, its gateposts ripped from the earth by God's own brutal hand, and only the animals know enough to make a run for it.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine