The Aviator's Wife Quotes

“Mother shook her head impatiently. 'You need to...stop looking for heroes, Anne.' Her speech was slow, slurred, but understandable. 'Only the weak need...heroes...and heroes need...those around them to remain weak. You're...not weak.' I remembered those words. I knew they were true, all of them. True about me, and true about Charles. I brought them out, every now and then, as I kept working -- on both the manuscript and myself. And, perhaps on my definition of my marriage. No, my prayer for my marriage; a marriage of two equals. With separate -- but equally valid -- views of the world; shared goggles no more, but looking at the same scenery, at the same time.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Only the weak need … heroes … and heroes need … those around them to remain weak.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Dana taught me that the ability to grieve deeply also meant that a person had the capacity to love deeply, laugh deeply, live deeply -- and that this was a capacity to be cherished.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“dreams may have been the paintings on my walls, but doubts and fears were the bars on my windows.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“JEALOUSY IS A TERRIBLE THING. It keeps you up at night, it demands tremendous energy in order to remain alive, and so you have to want to feed it, nurture it—and by so wanting, you have to acknowledge that you are a bitter, petty person. It changes you. It changes the way you view the world; minor irritations become major catastrophes; celebrations become trials.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Marriage breeds its own special brand of loneliness, and it’s far more cruel. You miss more, because you’ve known more.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“I still can't stop marveling that this same boy chose me; and I'm glad that I can't, for we should rejoice in being seen, needed. Loved.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Who was this woman before me, her face imprinted with the expectations of others? I was Mom. I was Wife. I was Tragedy. I was Pilot. They all were me, and I, them. That was a fate we could not escape, we women; we would always be called upon by others in a way men simply never were. But weren't we always, first and foremost -- woman? Wasn't there strength in that, victory, clarity -- in all the stages of a woman's life?”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“A woman's life, always changing, accommodating, then shedding, old duties for new; one person's expectations for another until finally, victoriously, emerging stronger. Complete.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“To live for oneself is a terrifying prospect; there is comfort in martyrdom...

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― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Unlike men, women got less sintimental as we aged, I was discovering. We cried enough, when we were young; vessels overflowing with the tears of everyone we loved.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“I will fly, alone. Wearing my own pair of goggles, my view of the world just as unique, just as wonderful, and his was, but different. Mine.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“... afraid of everything because nothing truly terrible had happened to me, yet.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“For despite the pain of loss, as time went on, the memory of those I'd loved warmed my heart more than grieved it.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Sorrow was my constant companion, even though I no longer wept. It was the shadow that followed me on sunny days, the weight pressing down upon my spirits on cloudy ones.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Only the weak need... heroes... and heroes need... those around them to remain weak. You're not weak.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Were we women always destined to appear as we were not, as long as we were standing next to our husbands?”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“And that was, finally, why I loved him -- because he never complained when I had a headache or changed my mind about something. He never shut down when I revealed my fears, my worries. He never tried to make me feel less, weaker, than he was -- because he shared his own emotions with me, as well.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“To my children, I was just Mom. That was all. And before that, I had been Charles’s wife, the bereaved mother of the slain child. That was all. But before that, I had been a pilot. An adventurer. I had broken records—but I had forgotten about them. I had steered aircraft—but I didn’t think I would know how to, anymore. I had soared across the sky, every bit as daring as Lucky Lindy himself, the one person in the world who could keep up with him. Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would I ever be able to soar again? Would I ever have the courage? Did any woman? Or did we exist only as others saw us?”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would i ever be able to soar again? Would I ever have the courage? Did any woman? Or did we exist only as others saw us?...I saw myself through her (my daughter's) eyes, I saw myself through Charles's eyes, always; I never looked into a mirror and saw myself through my own.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“But it was never over for me; I never quite found my way out. Sorrow was my constant companion, even though I no longer wept. It was the shadow that followed me on sunny days, the weight pressing down upon my spirits on cloudy ones.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“I saw myself through her eyes, I saw myself through Charles’s eyes, always; I never looked into a mirror and saw myself through my own.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“What need was there for words, when we had just shared the sky?”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“My stomach was so full of butterflies and other insects with busy, brushing wings—entirely appropriate under the circumstances, I couldn’t help but think!—that I could hardly fall asleep. And when at last I did, I know I slept lightly. As if I remembered, even in my slumber, that I had a dream beneath my pillow that I did not wish to crush.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“His eyes were so blue as to be startling; I decided I’d never seen blue eyes before, until that moment. They were the color of morning, the color of the ocean; the color of the sky.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“At the age of twenty-five, he had conquered not only the entire planet but all the sky above it.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“And I knew, as I had always known but somehow forgotten to remember in these past years, that I could never have done it, that no one else could ever have done it. That I would never know anyone as brave, as astonishing -- as frustrating, too, but that was, I was forced to admit finally, part of his charm -- as the slightly stooped elderly gentleman standing beside me in the shadows, listening while schoolchildren read of his exploits. The man who was, for better, for worse, my husband. The man who I loved, in spite of himself.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Unlike men, women got less sentimental as we aged, I was discovering.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Would my son love me, when he was old enough to know what love meant?

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― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Now and adult, allowed a glimpse of these first cracks in my family's perfect surface, I couldn't help but wonder what else I didn't understand about us all.

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― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife