Without a Map Quotes

“The past lies beneath the surface, intransigent truth. Remembered or not, what we say and do remains, always.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map

“I have lived this life, and no matter what others may decide about it, I must claim each decision as mine. I have caused harm, failed in the expectations and obligations of love. I have loved well. What I do each day is carried within me until I die. ”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map

“Mourning with no end, and a sense that I had lost everything - my child, my mother's love and protection, my father's love and protection, the life I had once imagined for myself - hollowed me out. I floated every day alone and disconnected, and could not find comfort or release. I understood clearly that my history had harmed me, had cut me off from the normal connections between people. Every day for five years I had been afraid of this disconnection, feeling the possibility of perfect detachment within my reach, like a river running alongside, inviting me to step into its current.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map

“I didn't make this plan. I just wake up sometimes and want to crawl out of my life.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map

“The world waits for you with all its beauty, but also its frights and its pain.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map

“The lights come on and my future returns in the glare.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map

“I feel the swelling energy, the inexplicable, restless hunger, rising in my own innocent life. I don't care at all about the music or the drinking or the gathering together of teenagers for fun and the thrill of belonging. But my father is gone. He has a new life, a new wife and daughter, and never calls or visits. I miss him badly. My mother is inaccessible. My older brother and sister have moved on to their own lives, leaving me alone at home and on the beach while my mother works and plays with Peter.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map

“Do I know how to love, how not to harm, how to protect and defend, how to be sanctuary? I have believed from the moment I gave birth to Alex and Benjamin, my kept children, that I know the obligations of a mother’s love. My two young sons are growing up inside their trust in me. I try so hard to be a good mother. I am safety, tenderness, praise. But I am also, always, the child cast out to the world a long time ago. I move between the sorrows of my past and an unrelenting will to love my children well. I am child, and I am mother.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map: A Memoir

“We must protect the girls," Mrs. Kroehne said. "You understand." I do understand. I am a contaminant and must be kept silent. It has been three months since my baby was born, three months since I walked away from my baby with milk dripping from my breasts. I will not say this to any of these young people during my time among them. I will construct careful lies and memorize them to explain myself, my dark inward life, my hunger for love, my tough resistance to trust.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map

“It is true that my shunning was a message from our community to my mother. Her rejection of me was a measure of the humiliation she felt. She believed until her death that I caused her to lose her friends and her stature in the town.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map