Mother in the Dark Quotes

“I didn’t have any expectations when I came to New York—just the misty, haloed idea that it was where true life waited, where it was not absurd to be alone.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“It’s easy for me to get lost in the shiny lacquer of childhood memories. There’s a familiar pull—a feeling of regret or longing—the indescribable need to be back in that house. In my mind, we don’t age. We’re three scrubby-haired girls.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“I often wondered if there was a girl somewhere who shared this feeling of detachment from those she loved, from herself. Was there another girl who looked and talked like me, who performed the same actions as me, maybe at the exact same moment? Another girl drinking a glass of skim milk sitting cross-legged on the pantry floor alone, eating handfuls of baking chocolate? Another girl looking out the passenger-side window of her father’s truck, watching the raindrops race down the glass, feeling bad when they hit the bottom and their shape? If she did exist, I never met her.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“It's two in the morning and we're retelling our troubles until we discover something new.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“There lives in me the memory of a mother who will not die. A mother I won't forget, no matter how long she's been changed.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“I knew this couldn’t be true, though my father could be the kind of withdrawn that made people uncomfortable, a shyness that was almost aggressive. And he seemed, to me, embarrassed by sadness. It was something he regarded as a kind of emotional promiscuity. “You’re too sensitive” was his favorite thing to say when I ran to him after a fight with my sisters. Still, I kept holding out for a change in him and could sense that he carried some small privacies, deep and abiding. I believed that one day he’d want to share something of himself, to confide in me.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“At the time, I thought I knew about sadness. What it felt like to cry after a screaming match with your sisters, to be told you couldn’t go somewhere, like the public swimming pool at the end of the street. I recalled moments in which I’d banged an elbow against a counter, the shock more intense than the pain, thinking this must have been what my mother’s ailments were like. In truth, I understood little about her. She remained se-cluded in her room behind a door clicked shut.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“I haven’t seen my mother in three years, since after college. The resentments have grown into something more, something menacing, strangling. I know she isn’t well. I’m plagued by thoughts of losing her, visions of her slipping into death while on her way to sleep. My worries for her are not enough to send me back to her punishing silence, her invasive weakness.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“She loses track of where her mother’s voice is coming from, begins to hear it from several directions at once as she steps and stumbles over dry ground, the houses and factories shrinking to toy buildings she can pinch with her fingers, the flaming disc of the sun washing the field white. It’s not until she reaches the chain-link fence that she realizes her mother is gone.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“Something about the scene unsettled me—the inherent closeness between mother and daughter, the irrefutable likeness...”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“I knew it was wrong to measure my parents' lacks and losses, but it's something I did often. I tried to decide which of them was the stronger person. To me, the answer was never obvious, ever changing, and this lack of certainty made me uneasy. I believed it was important for me to know which of them I should turn to, a strategy of survival.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

“There’s a load I carry with me, something I’ve inherited that pulses when I’m left alone.”
― Kayla Maiuri, Mother In the Dark: A Novel