The Cliffs Quotes

“You have to hand it to men, they’ve managed to convince us that the things that make women powerful are weaknesses.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“So few people today wrote, never mind saved, letters. They took a thousand pictures a month but didn’t bother to print them. They clicked a button and a year’s worth of correspondence over text was deleted forever. But all the anxiety assumed that this was a new problem, when in fact the vast majority of women’s writing—their love letters, their diaries—had always been discarded. Burned by the creator or her children, thrown away, lost. At the Schlesinger, they endeavored to find out what women of the past truly did and thought and felt, while also understanding that you could possess volumes of someone’s autobiography and still not know any of that.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“She had read somewhere that mothers mourned past versions of their children. It was impossible to know if it was the last time you would ever change a diaper, or rock your baby to sleep or carry him from one room to the next, until you were on the other side of it. Sometimes the child who greeted you in the morning was somebody altogether different from the one you kissed good night. “I did”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“I never had an image in mind for how life ought to look. I believe that to be the most freeing fact of my existence.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“It seemed to her that whenever New Englanders attempted to honor the legacy of Indigenous people, the story was told in past tense.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“There were moments when his maleness made her feel almost murderous.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“I’ve wondered why not. But then, women are in sync with nature. Our cycles are linked to the moon, to the tides. Like them, we change two dozen times over, every month. What do men do? They don’t get to experience much of life. We gestate the babies and bring them into existence while the men try not to faint. It’s why they’re obsessed with extrinsic markers of success. And war! Taking life to feel some speck of the power we get from making life. You have to hand it to men, they’ve managed to convince us that the things that make women powerful are weaknesses.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“You have to hand it to men, they've managed to convince us that the things that make women powerful are weaknesses. Motherhood is the most radical act in the world, and we've turned it into tapioca pudding. What's more toothless, more invisible in this culture, than a mother?”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“Native Americans believe some objects have a spiritual life,” the man was quoted as saying. “We mean it literally. We view sacred objects as living beings. This is more than theft. This is akin to kidnapping.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“Jane found herself behaving exactly as her mother would. This alarmed her. This was her greatest fear.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“If you want to fight colonization, you can start by telling the stories of the people we’ve been taught to believe went extinct long ago.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“I thought of the women who came alone to Sabbathday Lake, covered in bruises, intent on escaping such circumstances. And the widows who had been left destitute. A sense I had long before I could put it into words: that men were a danger to women. That women must find or build spaces of our own in order to be safe. The Shakers promised respite. Stability. Peace. Nonjudgment. Standing there in a hat shop in Portland, I felt intensely proud of the Shakers, as if they were still mine to be proud of. I thought of the true kindness I had known all my life.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“suntans and freckles the only proof that they had recently experienced some other, better form of existence.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“told Kanti those men could not comprehend what it meant to see and honor what Creator provides. Only the possibility for what it could become.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“Most Lives Will Be Lost to Time.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“Throughout their marriage, she had maintained the independent core of herself, which was possible with David in a way she didn’t think it would be with many partners. He understood why she never wanted to merge their finances, why she cared so deeply about her work, why she enjoyed socializing only under the right conditions and even then got depleted by it and needed to go off for a bit and be alone. He understood why she was scared to have children, even though a huge part of her wanted them. Jane was known and accepted by him in a way she didn’t think she ever would be by any other man.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“And I found myself hovering near the bedroom ceiling, looking down on my own body in our bed. As the shock of it hit me, Agnes stepped into the room. She came to my side. She cried. She touched my cheek. She pulled from her pocket a pair of scissors. I watched her sniff a lot of my hair. It is even now in the ring Agnes gave Hannah soon after inscribed with the words not lost, but gone before. Hanna wore the ring for years but eventually the sight of it made her too sad and she placed it in a box of keepsakes along with letters from her brother and the bonnet I made her, well-loved and worn from use and the amber type of her and Samuel.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“Just beginning to think about the next spring cleaning when consumption took me. Life was that way. What next, What next, what next? Until one day it was over.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“I regret only the complications we made for ourselves, the silly things we fretted over like we did not know our time together would be devastatingly brief, briefer than I ever imagined. From the day we met to the day I died. Just 17 years. A speck of time, a grain of sand.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“Do all your work as if you had 1000 years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“What I wish for most in the world is the chance to talk to my mother.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“But then, women are in sync with nature. Our cycles are linked to the moon, to the tides. Like them, we change two dozen times over, every month. What do men do? They don’t get to experience much of life. We gestate the babies and bring them into existence while the men try not to faint. It’s why they’re obsessed with extrinsic markers of success. And war! Taking life to feel some speck of the power we get from making life. You have to hand it to men, they’ve managed to convince us that the things that make women powerful are weaknesses. Motherhood is the most radical act in the world, and we’ve turned it into tapioca pudding. What’s more toothless, more invisible in this culture, than a mother?”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“A mother who committed the sin of loving her work as much as she loved her only child.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“What do men do? They don’t get to experience much of life. We gestate the babies and bring them into existence while the men try not to faint. It’s why they’re obsessed with extrinsic markers of success. And war! Taking life to feel some speck of the power we get from making life. You have to hand it to men, they’ve managed to convince us that the things that make women powerful are weaknesses. Motherhood is the most radical act in the world,”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“There had been a whiplash-like quality to her life for the past year and a half. Things that seemed permanent just went poof. Jane didn’t have time to process one bit of bad news before the next arrived.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“It seemed as though she wanted Jane, whose mother had died, to console her over the prospect of her own mother dying at some unspecified time in the future.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“She had read somewhere that mothers mourned past versions of their children. It was impossible to know if it was the last time you would ever change a diaper, or rock your baby to sleep or carry him from one room to the next, until you were on the other side of it. Sometimes the child who greeted you in the morning was somebody altogether different from the one you kissed good night.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs

“looked”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Cliffs