Maude Quotes

“The pain never really goes away. It gets better, and you finally get to a place where you aren’t thinking about it every minute of every day.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“She didn’t go in chronological order, but spoke of whatever came to her mind. One night she would talk of her childhood, another of the wars or the depression. Sometimes she talked about losing four of her five children. It wasn’t until many years later when I repeated some of these things to my daughter that I fully realized how epic a tale my grandmother’s life had actually been. My daughter said to me, “Why don’t you write it down for me?”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge, and thy people shall be my people and thy God, my God.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“Gene put his hand on mine and told me what went on at the hospital, “I don’t know what happened to me, Mom. When I saw that baby it was like a whole part of me that I didn’t even know existed woke. My mind hasn’t been off her for a split second ever since. I thought that I could never love anyone the way I love Evelyn, but that baby has changed my mind. I don’t care if she does belong to someone else, she’s mine. Does that make any sense at all?” I rocked and nodded. “It’s a funny thing, that feeling. It doesn’t always come when it’s supposed to, and sometimes it happens when you weren’t even looking for it.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“patience was a virtue.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“I also think that sometimes the good stretches are so good that it must count for double time,”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“Well, I guess there’s say-so Christians, and there’s real Christians.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“didn’t pick up a handful of dirt to throw. I couldn’t do it. Momma hated dirt.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“and then cried for the first time, but it wasn’t a sorrowful crying. I was so awful angry that the Lord had let this happen, angry right down to the marrow of my bones. It made me even more afraid to feel that way. I had been taught, and I believed, that it was a sin to be angry with God. I was afraid that God would punish me for the way I felt.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“There was a Baptist church to the east end and a Holiness church to the west. My family was Holiness, and our lives revolved around our church. We went to meeting Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“There’s a peacefulness that comes over you when you sew. I guess that it’s because you don’t think about any of your worries, you just let your mind work on the fabric and the thread. When you concentrate on one small section at a time, it’s almost a surprise when it’s finished and you see it as completed work.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“I think now God gives each one of us a measure of happiness for our lives, and some are allowed more than others.”
― Donna Mabry, Maude

“It was late afternoon when we stopped on the banks of the Mississippi to spend the night across the river from Caruthersville, Missouri. We could see the Powell Ferry on the other side. It would take us across in the morning. I’d lived all my life only a few miles from the river, but had never seen it before. It was a wonderful and frightening thing to me. I learned in school that it stretched all the way to the south end of the United States. I watched the boats with their cargo pass by and thought about the places they would stop before they found New Orleans. I daydreamed a little about what it would be like to get on one of the boats with Lulu and sail away from the life that faced me.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“The Holiness Church was different for me that day. All my life I’d looked forward to the services. They sang bright and lively tunes, except on the Sunday mornings when they had the Lord’s Supper and sang “Break Thou the Bread of Life.” They clapped their hands in joy. People would stand and testify about how good God was to them, and how Jesus had saved them and changed their lives.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“Bessie introduced him to the rest of the family, and he greeted them each in turn without taking his eyes off me. I could feel my face turning red. We all chatted outside the church door for a few minutes before we went in for the service. Bessie and her husband sat in the row across from me and my family. During the preaching, I looked over at George a few times. He was always looking right at me and smiled when he caught my eye. I felt myself blush again.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“The days were growing shorter, and oil was too expensive to use often, so after dinner James and I would sit on the front porch of our cabin until dusk and talk about his work at the store, the people he’d seen during the day, and our dreams for our life. On Saturdays he played baseball. He still had hopes of a professional career. It was 1906 and another league, the American, had been formed to compete with the National. Baseball was sweeping the country. They’d even begun forming teams all the way across the ocean, in Europe.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“. I failed as a mother to Bud, and now Paul. He was hopeless, and as much as I wanted to blame George, I had to share the responsibility. If I’d fought harder to get Paul an education, George might have given in. I should have put my foot down, but I hadn’t known how.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“Our cabin was about twenty feet square and had a fireplace and four windows, one on each side of the door, and on each side wall. It even had its own outhouse in the back. He painted both buildings inside and out, put a new wood floor in the cabin and the outhouse, and even got glass for the windows. Mom Connor didn’t understand why we didn’t just live with them in the big house, but James insisted that we had to have our own place, and I’m glad he did. It was better for both of us. I didn’t know then, but I was later to learn that it didn’t work to have two women under one roof.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“When Paul’s shoe soles wore out, I couldn’t find leather pieces to mend them, so I cut a stack of cardboard in the shape of the insoles and padded them so they would last longer. He changed the liners every night. I wore heavy cotton stockings instead of nylon, and when the elastic garters wore out I learned to stick my finger in the top of the hose, twist it several times and tuck it in the binding to make it stay up. I wore them until the toes and heels were completely gone and I had blisters on my feet. It wasn’t long until every one of the women in my house was wearing white anklets. They lasted better than stockings.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“I came into this world as Nola Maude Clayborn in 1892, in Perkinsville, in the northwest corner of Tennessee, a few miles west of Dyersburg. Pinned to the ground by a church spire at each end of the road that cut the town in half, Perkinsville was barely a wide space in the road. The houses were so far apart it was almost country. It was made up mostly of farmers and the businesses that served them.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“things she had to tell. At the same time, her soft voice was a lullaby inviting me to sleep. I wonder now if she found it her personal therapy to murmur her”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“I didn’t expect that he would hurt me. He’d been so considerate and seemed to be such a gentle person. If he was as good to me as he was to his horse, we’d get along fine.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“she was standing next to the back porch, twirling a chicken around her head. It was an ordinary sight to anyone in a country area, but the look on the old woman’s face gave me a start. She enjoyed what she did. I put my arm around Lulu’s shoulder and hurried her to the front door. “I guess we’re having chicken for supper,” I said.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“Grandma Maude and Donna”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“Grandma Maude and Donna Gene, 1962”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“My parents divorced when I was three, and my mother left me to be raised”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“The greater substance of this, and many of the direct quotes, are written in my grandmother’s words, and are what I heard from her during those long-ago nights we shared a bed.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“As long as I lived, I remembered everything my mother taught me, and not just about sewing”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude

“It felt like walking into another world, into someone else’s life more complicated than my own, and I found that comforting.”
― Donna Foley Mabry, Maude