Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Quotes

“The children always needed Fern to be a different kind of mother than she had been the week before. They exhausted her and she longed for a break and then she missed them acutely the moment they were out of sight—that was the truth of motherhood.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“She came from people who thought they were too good to run from the cold, too hearty, too real. Fern allowed herself only short dreams of summer, properly earned summer, after winter and after spring.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“How furiously she loved them and how heavy it was to carry that quantity of love, how perilous to care for those delicate bodies in the spinning world.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“There should be a word for this happiness, she thought. The happiness of nothing extra.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Nothing was more terrifying than what families could do to each other.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“She was meant to find a good-enough life and settle into its quiet.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Life is effortful,” said Mac. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s good to have work to do.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“It might still drown you, but love got deeper with time.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“unless one bought her way out of it, motherhood was a small room with high walls and no door.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“This was a season of worry and joy living side by side in Fern. They did not cancel each other out or blend to create a soft grey. Love could not temper fear and fear could not temper love.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“She took a few steps away from him, let him stand there alone in the house in which they had lived, one of the many attempts they had made at their marriage. She watched her husband, her love, nearly sightless. He looked like a headless flower, just a stem. She forgave him and did not yet. She was more his and less than she had been. Ahead of them were years of pulling closer and years of pushing away and years of pulling closer again.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“She remembered writing about the hugeness of motherhood, what it was like to love after your heart had been born out into the world and was at risk every second of every day.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Maybe they felt light and full of perhaps.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Giving anything for one's children, even if that something was a Thoroughbred chestnut mare that cost as much as a small yacht, was an act of generosity and selflessness.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“A big family was one of the socially acceptable indulgences and it justified a bigger house, more cars, a stable full of horses.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Fern was surprised by the things he cared about, by the resting places for his nostalgia.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“She was not the only one carrying the story of her life. That's what she needed her parents to be, more than caregivers: keepers of the selves she had grown out of.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“What am I looking for?" Fern thought...The answer was too easy. Love, home. herself - what else did people go searching for?”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“This was the prize of womanhood: looking angelic in a gown and someone asked you to dance and everyone in the room noticed you. The prize of manhood came slowly and later: earn something, put it away, buy yourself a car, flirt with the child's teacher, get a raise. Fern wondered where these two axes crossed - what single moment in the life of a man and woman, their lives joined forever, felt exactly the same amount of great to both of them?”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Adults worked hard to shave down the inconvenient and difficult edges - love smoothed over, war and death sanded out - until all that remained was a midline. A routine.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“He had learned this from her brother: sometimes the only comfort is the fact of another person. Not a dam, but a surface to wash across.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“It's like she's trying to prove to me that no matter what we do, we become the people we were always going to become.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“It had been a true dream, sometimes. Fern running through the wildflowers and grasses; supper on the porch by candlelight; lying on the dew-grass at night while the stars poured down.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Like everyone with a near-perfect body, she had had a catalogue of the tiniest faults.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Evening thickened and the children let the feeling of unrest gather at their feet. They let worry in, a rising tide, ankles, knees, thighs. They swam in it and what struck them was that it felt kind of good.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“It seemed unfair, to love that hard with your heartmuscle still so wet and new.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“It seemed terribly dangerous to be a living creature, a body in need of nourishment and love for the duration of its existence.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“He had breadcrumbs in his thick blonde mustache -- he was not the person to ask about saving oneself from the small humiliations.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“They would take their sunburns to school with them, and their skin would hurt under the blue and white uniforms. At least there was that, at least there was proof that they had once been free.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“The dinosaur skeleton was a body plus time. They all were. The question was what they wanted to do and who they wanted to love in the years when muscle and skin still covered them.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty