Lilli de Jong Quotes

“So little is permissible for a woman—yet on her back every human climbs to adulthood.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“How is it that shame affixes itself to the violated, and not to the violator?”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“Do not be surprised, when thee has children, to find what I have found: of all the kinds of love that bind, a mother’s love for her offspring is the strongest imperative on earth. It is as common as sunlight, as all-penetrating, as necessary to life.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“Bitterness is poison, yes, but I hold a flask of it to my lips and drink.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“1883. Third Month 16

Some moments set my heart on fire, and that’s when language seems the smallest. Yet precisely these bursts of feeling make me long to write. I sit now in a high-walled courtyard, amid the green smells and slanted light of early spring, with that familiar burning in my heart. I’ll need to destroy these pages before returning home, but no matter; for the first time since Mother’s death, words come to me.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“We can pursue our true wants, Mill writes, only when doing so harms no one to whom we are obliged.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“And how those cries affect me! Until now, no matter how much I’ve cared for a person, with the exception of Mother in her dying hours, and despite how dreadful this sounds, I’ve found it easier to bear their suffering than my own. Not so with Charlotte. My shoulders, back, arms, and neck ache from holding her; my nipples are scabbed and sometimes bleeding; yet the most worn-out, painful part of me is my heart. It stretches so wide when she’s contented that I believe its fibers are tearing. When she suffers, it shrinks and throbs and hardens into a knot. Never before have I even thought of my heart as the muscle it is. Never has mine seemed to expand and contract in concert with my feelings. It hurts continually now from responding to the inconstant creature that is Charlotte.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“Why had I failed, when all my aims were good?”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“When I gardened at home, I often considered how the growth of plants resembles the gradual growth of the spirit. And seeing life make its way from seed to plant does bring one a glorious hope. All through the plant’s movement toward maturity, it is beautiful: adorable in its seedling state, full of promise as it sends its stalks up and out, then gorgeously fulfilled as it offers its yearly profit. Yet this no longer”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“How does a baby know to look its mother in the eyes?”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“If my spirit is pressed even harder, I wondered, will it yield something marvelous—the spirit’s equivalent to olive oil or the juice of grapes?”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“remembering how everyone is vulnerable to hardship,”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“The doctor cut the fleshly cord that connected us, but an invisible one has taken its place. I begin to suspect that this one can be neither cut nor broken.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“When someone calls me madam, I think they mean my mother.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“As if passion alone explained our predicaments. Our being female and unlucky—and, in my case, a near idiot in the ways of amorous men—must be added to that.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“The individuals in a family fit together like pieces in a puzzle, forming a larger picture, making clear the nature of the whole and its parts.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (2006) provides dramatic instances of the lifelong impacts of early pregnancy and of giving up a baby.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“Janet Golden, whose book A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (1996) was vital to my understanding of urban wet nursing and more in the nineteenth century; her excellent references made it easy to choose further resources.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“In her definitive work A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (1996), Janet Golden notes that these women left no accounts of their experiences, stating that “wet nurses remain historically silent.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“when I was stunned at being the basis of a newborn’s survival and awed by how my body and heart changed in service of her. Becoming a mother was no small shift in identity. I would never see any aspect of living in the same way again.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“Hope: She flashed me a gummy smile, which my heart swelled to see, and turned up her eyes for a period of staring. Her soul ran like a river behind her eyes. I sensed two rivers joining in our gaze.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong