White Dresses Quotes

“turned over and placed a pillow on top of my head. One thing was clear: just as I was gaining a husband, I was losing a mother. The next morning I awoke tired”
― Mary Pflum Peterson, White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters

“bought a plot for me years ago, one for your mother, too. But we don’t have one for you. I wonder if I should make some calls.” The comment was insane—something that no father should say to his still-alive daughter when the results of her biopsy were still unknown. If anything, it was something to be thought, not uttered.”
― Mary Pflum Peterson, White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters

“But she was thrilled with the contact, happy to throw her arms around her father, whom she still called Daddy, and to talk with her mother, whose approval she still sought even at the age of sixty.”
― Mary Pflum Peterson, White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters

“You’re my best friend, Mary,” she cried. “You may not have realized it all this time, dear daughter. But you’re my best friend. And I’m going to miss you more than you’ll ever know.”
― Mary Pflum Peterson, White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters

“Sometimes,” my mother went on, “I think of white dresses as a way of starting over. They’re sort of a way of wiping the whole slate clean. Just like what happens in the wintertime when the snow comes. It wipes away everything in preparation for a new year, a new spring.”
― Mary Pflum Peterson, White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters

“Once in my senior year of high school, when I didn’t want to attend an early-morning Mass with her, I snarled, in typical teenager style, “What’s your deal? Why do you love a church so much that doesn’t love anyone? It rejected you when you left Oldenburg. It rejected you when Dad divorced you. How can you still love it so much?”
― Mary Pflum Peterson, White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters

“If I can accept who you are, then why can’t you?”
― Mary Pflum Peterson, White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters

“Turkey actually”
― Mary Pflum Peterson, White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters