Mary Frances Marlow > Mary Frances's Quotes

“People always say not to forget because then history will repeat itself. But maybe history will repeat itself anyway, and forgetting is how we bear it.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“She wiggles and squirms and shifts, and fear hums beside me as I begin to understand that keeping a child is like keeping the sky— always with me but never mine.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“The next morning the air is stock still. But my chest howls, like I've eaten the wind.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“But salvation is not an erasure, it's a redistribution of pressure.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“And I don't know if it's bad like abuse. Abuse is much easier to identify when it's not in your own kitchen.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“It was our pain that pulled us together like magnets, that medicinal click of solidarity between two hurting people. But as powerful as pain might be, it was never going to keep us together.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Time feels flimsy as the cardboard swirlies that will hang over Jet's head in the school gym while the bass line reverberates in her chest, and she wraps her skinny limbs around someone who is not me.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow. Louise Erdrich, LaRose”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Shh, shh. Your mom will be here soon to feed you. We’re here at the beginning. I’ll paint a bottle of milk for you. I will not throw it. But I left my white crayon under the table. If we can’t take a drive, how about a little walk? I wake. Startle. She has been fed. Grown up. Hated me. Loved me again. I am old. Dying. And she is still here. This is a forgiveness I never gave my own father. But—Georgette! I close my eyes. Georgette.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“I used to use alcohol to drown out my problems,” the woman says, “then it finally dawned on me that my problems were better swimmers than I was.”
― Wally Lamb, The River Is Waiting

“You must not measure salvation like an ingredient that’s either there or not. Yes, salvation can be a heroic moment of rescue. But more often, it’s smaller. Slower.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“We begin to say goodbye as soon as we say hello”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Everyone says gone but not forgotten, but it's ultimately the other way around. Generations later, a mother is forgotten but not gone- a pulse in the bodies born from her love”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Time can wash dirt off of a memory until it is revealed as something else entirely.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Sometimes a woman's choice is between impossible and impossible and impossible, and she just has to make it. Survival calculations become more urgent than rightness.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“It's not that you don't need anyone-just that you don't need everyone.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“There are two kinds of grief at a wake: grieving the loss of what was and grieving the loss of what wasn't.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“salvation is not erasure—it’s a redistribution of pressure”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“it does something to a girl—even a grown girl with an awful father—to see her father hurt.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“a man can be sorry from any height or depth, and he had better say it while he can.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Grief can be irrational”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“What's the difference between an excuse and a reason?”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“keeping a child is like keeping the sky—always with me but never mine.”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“There's something permanent about where you start”
― Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years

“Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength—carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.’—Corrie ten Boom.”
― Wally Lamb, The River Is Waiting

“Having hope is kind of like praying. Like asking God for something and hoping He’ll hear you. But if you have an expectation, it’s more like a demand than a prayer. Like you’re saying, here’s what I expect, God, so make it happen for me. See? Like you’re the one who gets to give the orders.”
― Wally Lamb, The River Is Waiting

“ ‘Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength—carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.’—Corrie ten Boom.”
― Wally Lamb, The River Is Waiting

“I open the front and read the dedication: “To those who live in prisons of their own or others’ making.”
― Wally Lamb, The River Is Waiting

“If you focus on what’s harmonious and beautiful in your present surroundings, harmony and beauty will follow you.”
― Wally Lamb, The River Is Waiting