The Matriarch Quotes

“At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal,” she said then. “You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend, or a parent.”
― Susan Page, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

“I remember realizing life went on,” she said, “whether we were looking or not.”
― Susan Page, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

“The characteristics that marked the start were apparent for the rest of their lives. They took risks. They trusted their instincts. They rolled with the punches.”
― Susan Page, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

“What you see is what you get,” she said years later. “People who worry about their hair all the time, frankly, are boring.”
― Susan Page, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

“Barbara’s mother, Pauline Pierce, had been shipping care packages to Odessa with essentials she assumed weren’t available there, things like cold cream and soap. “As far as my mother was concerned, we could have been living in Russia,” Barbara Bush said. She finally wrote to inform her mother that her adopted town “had big, beautiful supermarkets, which Rye did not have at the time.” After”
― Susan Page, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

“she told me, even though she had no idea what”
― Susan Page, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

“It’s part of the drug problem, part of ignorance and AIDS, part of homelessness and alienation,” she declared in 1990 in her commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania, celebrating its 250th anniversary. She cited Benjamin Franklin, who had founded the school. “When Ben Franklin was dining in Paris, one of his companions posed the question: ‘What condition of man most deserves pity?’ Each guest proposed an example. When Franklin’s turn came, he offered: ‘a lonesome man on a rainy”
― Susan Page, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty