When We Were the Kennedys Quotes

“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

“It took years for me to know this, to see how loss can tighten your grip on the things still possible to hold.”
― 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

“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 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

“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

“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 valley opens like a coat I can’t wait to put on.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“A black man in a puffy jacket peers in at us, whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. The whites of his eyes, too, look really white, the inside of his lip the baby pink of Mrs. Norkus’s petunias. He takes our measure—what can he be thinking, a priest traveling with all these women? He smiles, points, gives Mum a set of quick, easy instructions. From the back seat we three gape at him with our mouths half open. Anne pats my knee: Stop staring, sweetie. The puffy-coat man stands back after giving his big-smile directions: “Ya can’t miss it!” Mum will chuckle over this the whole day, repeating “‘Ya can’t miss it!’” as if to say, Mother of Mary, they talk just like us! She’ll shake her head. “That man was so nice. Wasn’t that man nice, girls? ‘Ya can’t miss it!’” And we don’t. Down this street, turn here, up that street, turn there, and look-girls-look: the White House, just where that nice man said.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“Mum looks over the menu, adjusting her glasses. She’s wearing a good dress, her lipstick and perfume, her crystal earrings from Dad. Her hair falls in short cloudy waves. Mum frowns over the big print, pretending to decide, but really she’s looking for something cheap. “I’ll have the Tommy Tucker,” she tells the waitress. “That’s a children’s plate,” the waitress says. “Oh,” Mum says. She blushes, because now the waitress knows. “I’m not very hungry. It looked small.” “Children only.” So Mum orders a hamburger like the rest of us, her cheeks blazing. Is she thinking of Jackie with her bone china and embroidered linen? She starts to chuckle, because the Tommy Tucker sounds so funny, and now we’re all laughing, even as I redden up myself on Mum’s behalf. Back in the car, we take turns saying, “I’ll have the Tommy Tucker!” as the highway exits zip past. “And here I was,” Mum says, hooting now, “all dressed up! Can you imagine the waitress in the back, telling the cook, ‘That woman ordered the Tommy Tucker, and she was wearing crystal earrings!’” “I’ll have the Tommy Tucker!” “Ya can’t miss it!”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“The Catholic tradition of my childhood—which I recall with affection, some awe, and a measure of yearning—did not allow for randomness. Every word and deed, every sorrow and triumph, every birth and death belonged to a Divine Plan. If at times you thought this Plan unreasonable, senseless, or just plain mean, you were asked to trust that even the most extreme sorrow had to be a blessing in disguise. Almost everything essential came to you in disguise. Everything that happened was part of something beyond your human ken, a necessary preparation—for what, remained to be seen. Best case: something better. Worst case: something worse. Wherever you fit into this plan—giving Communion or receiving Communion; top of the class or mentally retarded; working or on strike; whole and happy or hacked to pieces by grief—you fit. That was the Plan’s cruel beauty. You wept if you had to, hid your face and gnashed your teeth, but you knew that if you repaired to your bed of pain it was because God wanted you there—only you; only there—to complete the unknowable requirements of something great and vast and ultimately beautiful. Believe it or not, this was a comfort.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“I begin, possibly for the first time, to perceive accomplishment as a way out of despair.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“We have two choices,” she says, holding me fast. “We can ask why-why-why, over and over. Why-why-why?” She pauses, letting that useless plea sink in. “Or,” she says, “we can just do.” I well up. “I don’t want to just do.” She waits; this is how I always know she’s listening. Then: “Monnie,” she whispers. “Just doing doesn’t hurt as much as why-why-why.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“I am not yet old enough to understand that despair is the disease and motion is the cure.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“Sometimes I depart from the story to write a single word over and over, a discipline Sister Ernestine had insisted on, the better to practice our spelling and penmanship. Certain words become little obsessions, containing not only meaning and sound but an irresistible physical loveliness. I like shapely words like coop or loop or good, all those connected circles. In one of Anne’s books I find the name Oona, a word I write twenty-six times: thirteen times down one side of the page, thirteen times down the other. Words like tatter or letter or kettle resemble forest ridges in miniature, sudden peaks of l’s and t’s jutting up from a horizon of e’s and a’s and o’s. Words like ominous or sneer or simmer, their letters all the same size, look like bridges between spiky words like the or but. What satisfaction, to know how to read, to write, to spell these words; to admire them, to pronounce them, to define them; to arrange and rearrange them; to commit them to a sheet of paper made to last.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“When I get back upstairs, Anne’s washing Betty’s hair and Cathy’s in the parlor watching the Jackie Gleason Show. Mum is nowhere, with Tom purring in her arms, nowhere. She looks at me and comes to. She smiles.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“What are you reading?” I look up. It’s Denise, standing nearby with her bicycle. We were friends at school but I haven’t seen her since school let out. “Nancy Drew. She’s a sleuth.” “I love Nancy Drew.” Denise lays her bike on the grass, and in the miraculous way of childhood friendships, this moment—or a moment like it, small and unremarkable—marks our first as best and lifelong friends.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“Is it Dad? In there, in the parlor? One step, then another, and I’m at the parlor doorway, peering in. I see a human shadow in the darkness. Blood rushes through my ears, I can no longer place the sound I either did or did not hear, and then the figure resolves into the motionless shape of my mother.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“But I read the whole chapter last week, not just the half-page assignment, so I know what nobody else knows: Magellan died on the island of Mactan, his body savagely pierced by iron spears. He would have died anyway. Eventually. Of something. Even if he’d made it to the unheard-of age of one hundred, he’d be dead now; many hundreds more years had passed since then. These men who made memorable journeys, discovered fountains of youth and stores of gold and America itself—they all died in the end. In my newfound terror of the mystery of mortality, it is Magellan, the explorer with the gemlike name, who will keep me awake nights imagining death—my own, everyone’s. Forever after I’ll conflate the image of Magellan gliding over the straits in his ship with Dad moving down Mexico Avenue on his own last voyage.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“Bit by bit, word by word, over the length of this fragile, disarranging day, I take in the remarkable fact that Dad had lived a life before me.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“Now Dad’s the one in the stories. “Albert.” “Uncle Albert.” “The red fulla.” Instead of being snuffed out like a spent cigarette, Dad’s expanding, like the trail of smoke steaming up from his ashtrays, and the smoke goes everywhere.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“This was heritage, a chain made of words that had always felt a little like make-believe.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“This is a memoir: the truth as I recall it. You will find herein no composite or invented characters, no rearranged chronologies, no alterations in the character or appearance of the people I remember. I changed only one name. One chapter contains a blizzard that my sisters now inform me occurred on a different occasion; and indeed, when I looked up weather for November 1963 I found not only no blizzard, but—astonishingly—no snow to speak of. The inaccurate memory is so embedded in my psyche, however, so inextricable from the remembered events of that chapter, that in the end I decided to leave it alone. Otherwise, events or processes I could not remember with accuracy or was too young at the time to understand—for example, papermaking, strike politics, the specific character of my father’s work—I filled out as accurately as I could through research, the venerable Rumford Falls Times, and the memories of others. The bulk of this story, however, results from my having been an observant child living in a vibrant place and time.”
― Monica Wood, When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

“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