Mothers and Sons Quotes

“What if the story were told that way? Shaping narratives. Presenting events in a particular order. It’s what I’ve spent my adult life doing. Whittling stories down into the patterns that the law can see. And all of them written for precisely the same purpose: to justify to the system a person’s fear of returning to the scene of a crime. And yet in that shaping, what violence is done to the fullness of an actual life.”
― Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons

“How full of shame it is to be lonely.”
― Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons

“Did his being alone pain him as much as it pained her? That a child of such deep affections was without someone to offer them to?”
― Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons

“Unless you’re still the person I fell in love with, you’re betraying me.”
― Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons: A Novel

“On and on, the ordinary noticing of the unstill mind. We’re like movie projectors, one of her meditation teachers had said, loaded with an endless reel of film, and our minds are the bulbs that light the frames. Get some popcorn, take a seat. The movie has no plot. Eventually it will bore you. Then maybe you can begin.”
― Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons: A Novel

“The language of love slips from my lover’s tongue, that song went, cooler than ice cream, and warmer than the sun.”
― Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons: A Novel