Mourning Dove Quotes

“The Memphis Finley and I landed in was my mother’s Memphis. It was magnolia-lined and manicured, black-tailed and bow-tied. It glittered in illusory gold and tinkled in sing-song voices. It was cloistered, segregated, and well-appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything from hand towels to silver because nothing mattered more than one’s family and to whom they were connected by lineage that traced through the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta.”
― Claire Fullerton, Mourning Dove

“The mind registers trauma in step-by-step increments, lest you become overwhelmed. It is the unadulterated meaning of saving grace, a mechanism within each of us that is far too intelligent to make use of the basic instincts of fight or flight, because it is beyond it. The mind freezes in the critical moment, and waits until you are strong enough to take the next step.”
― Claire Fullerton, Mourning Dove

“Your heart breaks only once in a lifetime. Every offense in its wake is only a variation of the original laceration. Only once can you say you have no frame of reference. Only once are you knocked to your knees by an intractable powerlessness, where the only option is surrender in listless defeat. Subsequent infractions are damaging in their own right, but they’re only a visitation of the original wound, which remains half-healed forever, with scar tissue that defines you for the rest of your life.”
― Claire Fullerton, Mourning Dove

“It was cloistered, segregated, and well-appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything from hand towels to silver because nothing mattered more than one’s family and to whom they were connected by lineage that traced through the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta.”
― Claire Fullerton, Mourning Dove

“occupying the same stream. They were distinct opposites going through the motions of co-creating a life, but the gossamer veneer of their marriage started to shred the day my father impulsively quit his job as vice president of a bank in Minneapolis. One hundred thousand dollars from a deceased aunt I’d never heard of must have seemed like a lifetime cushion to my father, but when he shared the news with my mother, Finley and I heard the ballistic reverberation in every room of the house.”
― Claire Fullerton, Mourning Dove

“What is the fire of inspiration that resides within, if not something to follow along a path?”
― Claire Fullerton, Mourning Dove