My Sunshine Away Quotes

“You’re going to have a hard time in life if you let every little mistake bother you, he said. Life is good, son. Enjoy it.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“She is the innocent stuff in the background of time.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“But for every adult person you look up to in life there is trailing behind them an invisible chain gang of ghosts, all of which, as a child, you are generously spared from meeting. I know now, however, that these ghosts exist, and that other adults can see them. The lost loves, the hurt friends, the dead: they follow their owner forever. Perhaps this is why we feel so crowded around those people who we know have had hard times. Perhaps this is why we find so little to say. We suffer an odd brand of stage fright, I think, before all those dreadful eyes.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“But still, it broke my heart, like life did.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“life is made up, ever increasingly, of what you cannot change.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“Parents have that special skill of making the truth, no matter how benign, an embarrassing thing. We all know this.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“I believe the reasons we hang on to seemingly insignificant snippets of conversation, the smell of a particular pizza delivered by a particular guy, the shape of certain shadows on a particular wall, is that there may come a day when we are sitting in a hospital room visiting our mother as she lies on an uncomfortable bed, still recovering. And we are asking her questions and feeling nervous about what the doctor has said could be permanent damage caused by a blood clot the size of a pinpoint and we don't know if the way she is struggling to find the right words is a temporary exhaustion or the new reality and all we want to do is tell her we love her in a language no one has used before because we mean it in a way that no one has meant it before. And this will be a difficult time for us.
But then, in a break between the words, a commercial may come on the small television hung up in the corner of the room that we did not even know was playing. It may advertise some new drug, some insurance plan, and our mother will smile at the voice of the handsome actor standing in front of a green screen. She will then close her eyes and squeeze our hand, the one that she has been holding since we walked in, and say, "Oh, I used to have such a crush on him."
When she does this, our memory will be waiting.
Yes, yes, yes. It is love that we feel here.
This is the purpose of memory.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“And when I tell you that I love you I want, so badly, for you to understand what I mean.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted,” he reminded us. “It belongs to the brave.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“But for every adult person you look up to in life there is trailing behind them an invisible chain gang of ghosts, all of which, as a child, you are generously spared from meeting.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“As a kid you assume you know them because you see them often, and because they care for you. But for every adult person you look up to in life there is trailing behind them an invisible chain gang of ghosts, all of which, as a child, you are generously spared from meeting.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“If you could have frozen that moment in time, like we so often do in our photos, you would have seen my father about to reach into the throat of Jacques Landry and pull out his bullying heart. You would also see genuine fear in Mr. Landry’s broad face. More important, though, what I am trying to tell you is that within this quick exchange I understood that it is inside all of us men to be both menacing and cowardly. It is in all of us to have virtue and value and yet it is also in our power to fall into irrelevant novelty or, even worse, elicit indifference from the people we’ve loved. This is the challenge, I suppose, of fatherhood. And so I knew that, despite my father’s errors, he loved me. He loved us. I also knew that big and important parts of him were sorry because I knew that he was willing to fight. What more could I ask for? I will never apologize for loving him back.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“I’ve yet to meet a person who didn’t become a stranger to themselves in love”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“All I knew was that my father, when given the opportunity to be with me, to set me straight in life, had chosen to sacrifice nothing. He had altered no plans, nor did he consider the wild impropriety of this situation from my point of view. Rather, when told by my mother that I was in trouble, that I needed his help, he chose to simply endure me for an evening.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“I still had the tug of a dreamer inside me.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“There is a saying in South Louisiana that “when we eat one meal we talk about the next,” and this is true. Who wouldn’t? In this imagined menu lies a future, a forecasted life, a community, perhaps even a weekend full of cheer and good food.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“A dark color grows over the plant life, eventually growing so thick that it divorces the plant from the sun and a botanical sadness takes over.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“So, I have to wonder about people like him, about children perhaps doomed from birth by circumstances beyond their control. What chance did he have among us? How early is the future defined?”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“for every adult person you look up to in life there is trailing behind them an invisible chain gang of ghosts, all of which, as a child, you are generously spared from meeting. I know now, however, that these ghosts exist, and that other adults can see them. The lost loves, the hurt friends, the dead: they follow their owner forever. Perhaps this is why we feel so crowded around those people who we know have had hard times. Perhaps this is why we find so little to say. We suffer an odd brand of stage fright, I think, before all those dreadful eyes. And maybe that’s what my uncle had noticed about Mr. Simpson on the lawn that night of the fight. Maybe in my eyes, a child’s eyes, it was just the three of us squatting in the grass. But, to those two men, the lawn appeared to be full of bodies, full of the people they’d made mistakes with in life now tethered to them and ill-rested and serving no purpose but to remind them of the one awful thing: that life is made up, ever increasingly, of what you cannot change.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“for every adult person you look up to in life there is trailing behind them an invisible chain gang of ghosts, all of which, as a child, you are generously spared from meeting.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“What else, besides love, do we have?”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“Dear Whatever,” he said. “Please let my dog get lots of horny bitches in heaven. Or, if not that, let him come back to Earth infested with rabies and finish the job that he started when he was just trying to protect me from that asshole who is probably your biggest mistake. Or maybe just go back in time and switch life around so that my dad is the one that gets hunted for years and locked in a shed and then shot in the face by my dog. I’m good with any of these options. Okay, then. Fuck you very much. Amen.” - Jason Landry”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“annoyed. Parents have that special skill of making the truth, no matter how benign, an embarrassing thing. We all know this.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“More surprising, perhaps, was that I began to understand something important about humans and trees at that moment. I began to understand our shared history. To look at the world from a tree, as I had done so often in those years, is a fundamentally different way of seeing. It is contemplative and detached and the objects one studies from that height are rendered, at the same time, both majestic and small. A generally commonplace item, in other words, may stir admiration and mystery when viewed from that vantage point. Or, at worst, it may breed jealousy, desire, and contempt. It all depends on the viewer. And so, I have to wonder, what kind of viewer was I? What was that, exactly, up in the oak trees of Woodland Hills? An animal? Some sort of Peeping Tom? A sensitive boy racked with love and guilt? Maybe.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“And so the soul of this place lives in the parties that grow here, not just Mardi Gras, no, but rather the kind that start with a simple phone call to a neighbor, a friend. And after the heat is discussed and your troubles shared you say man it’d be nice to see you, your kids, your smile. And from this grows a spread several tables long, covered in newspaper, with long rows of crawfish spilled steaming from aluminum pots, a bright splash of red in the blanketing green of your yard. It is food so big it must be stirred with a paddle. You gather around this. You worship it. There is nothing strange about that.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“The city of New Orleans is also ironic. On a national scale, it consistently ranks first in both violent crime and in the number of city permits granted for public celebrations. It is a place that has known both slavery and brutal prejudice, and yet is vibrant with gays and transsexuals. It has been decimated, repeatedly, by plagues and battles and record-breaking storms and, rather than leave this place, the people of New Orleans instead take pride in the fact that the circumstances beset upon them are extraordinary and tragic. So, for anyone to act as if New Orleans is not the most interesting place in the world is, to a New Orleanian, uninteresting. For people to act as if New Orleans is anything other than its own planet, its own universe, is naïve.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“There would be love and loss and regret and injustice and the inside knowledge that the way that life fleets can just crush you. So”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“In my experience, nothing ever turned out as planned.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“At the beginning of that same summer, in 1989, all of our crepe myrtles shed. This is not uncommon. Gluttons for the heat, these trees line all the major roads and boulevards of East Baton Rouge Parish. You can cut them down to nothing each year if you like. They are unbothered. This is their home, and our Junes are filled with pink, red, and purple flowers because of it. During this time, however, when they are in full bloom, long shards of bark peel off their trunks. They lie in circles upon the roots like skins.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away

“After all those years, she still loved him. All three of us knew it. So, no need for me to recount for you the look I saw unfold and lie dead in her eyes when she realized that yet another meal she'd imagined between them would have to be eaten alone.”
― M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away