Rock Needs River Quotes

“All you get in this lifetime is yourself, and everyone else is a gift given for an uncertain period of time.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“I’ve eventually come away with, after trying unsuccessfully to train my parents to be what I thought they should be, is that the fewer expectations I have from people to give me what I need, the better. I can forage for it or it can drop on my head, but I can’t demand support, love, or even the right kind of attention from anyone, especially family. If and when it comes, I’m delighted.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“I remember the first months of being a mother more like an impressionist painting than a series of crisp snapshots.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“compassion and as light a touch as Kaelyn”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“I tried to explain to the class parent who romanticized the sole five-year-old boy at a group playdate as a “ladies’ man” just how shitty that was for the girls and the boys. Extreme and minute patriarchy doesn’t serve anyone well.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“Their experience, in the end, was ugly, humiliating. Scary. They felt, basically, like baby machines after their adoption experience—they were chattel to social workers, with the baby as the valuable commodity; they were marginalized in the hospital when they tried to assert their rights to hand over their child; they were garbage when they were abandoned by the agency in the face of medical bills that went unpaid.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“What I’ve eventually come away with, after trying unsuccessfully to train my parents to be what I thought they should be, is that the fewer expectations I have from people to give me what I need, the better. I can forage for it or it can drop on my head, but I can’t demand support, love, or even the right kind of attention from anyone, especially family. If and when it comes, I’m delighted.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“Because all you get in this lifetime is yourself, and everyone else is a gift given for an uncertain period of time.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“moony blue eyes and kept his short body in”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“My mother once told me that if you speak quietly, people have to work harder to hear you, and they’ll pay better attention to your words.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“In so many of these stories, there is always winning and losing.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption

“At sixteen, Bridgett moved in with her dad and stepmother in Princeton, Indiana, which she described as a small, boring town. Whatever hopes she had for a better, new life faded soon after she got there. Maybe there wasn’t enough room, not just in the house but also in their life.”
― Vanessa McGrady, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption