What My Mother and I Don't Talk About Quotes

“Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them. To know what it was like to have one place where we belonged. Where we fit.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with “mother” as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us. What I cannot tell her is all that I would tell her if I could find a way to not still be sad and angry about that.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“I love you past the sun and the moon and the stars,” she’d always say to me when I was little. But I just want her to love me here. Now. On Earth.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“It reminds me that in moments of pain I will never turn to her for comfort because she, hurt child as she is, will never be able to give it to me.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“We get so used to the stories we tell about ourselves. This is why we sometimes need to find ourselves in the stories of others.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“To say: Here is everything that keeps us from really talking. Here is my heart. Here are my words. I wrote this for you.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“A daughter is wedded to her mother first.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“couldn’t locate the specific feeling I’d had the last time we talked. I thought for a few hours after I cried in the bathroom that I would call her and I would tell her I loved her. But I did not trust calling her. I was afraid that if I called her, she would talk and it would be too hard for me to love her after that.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“I think, ultimately, other people aren’t real to us until they’re suffering or gone. That’s when the imagination begins to work, trying to sort things out, trying to get them right, to understand them.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“She’s happy. Don’t make her think she’s not.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“I have made my way into myself and learned that love, too, is contagious. I have learned that healing is possible. That we can make lives that we couldn’t even have imagined when we were little and that we can carry the little ones who we were into these new and luminous lives.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“Hearing this, I get a flash of pride at the fact that Peter wanted to be with my mother more than she wanted to be with him. This pride comes from the same internal place as the delusion I spent much of my young adulthood believing: that it is better to be the one desired more, rather than the one doing more desiring. As if love were a contest; as if desire were fixed, or absolute; as if either position could insulate you from being harmed or causing harm; as if being in control could insulate you from anything.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“This pride comes from the same internal place as the delusion I spent much of my young adulthood believing: that it is better to be the one desired more, rather than the one doing more desiring. As if love were a contest; as if desire were fixed, or absolute; as if either position could insulate you from being harmed or causing harm; as if being in control could insulate you from anything.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with “mother” as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves you and the danger of losing them.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“When she arrived in the hospital after my daughter was born, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and she held me, and I cried uncontrollably—because I could finally understand how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“I've spent enough time in Catholic churches to know what it means to sweep things underneath the rug.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to give this book to my mother. To present it to her as a precious gift over a meal that I've cooked for her. To say: Here is everything that keeps us from really talking. Here is my heart. Here are my words. I wrote this for you.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“Our mothers are our first homes, and that's why we’re always trying to return to them.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“Then slowly I can remember that I have made a different path for myself. I have found the ones who know my heart and keep it safe. I have created myself as someone who, on most days, I like, respect, and love. I have made my way into myself and learned that love, too, is contagious. I have learned that healing is possible. That we can make lives that we couldn't even have imagined when we were little and that we can carry the little ones who we were into these new and luminous lives.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“It has been one of the greatest blessings of my life that my sister is able to mirror my experience.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“A friend once told me that it was frankly a little bit exhausting to hear me talk about how much I loved my mother. But what can I say? My hunger for her feels endless.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“His hands are worms, my body dirt.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“pg.25 line 25”
― Cathi Hanauer, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“I still want to believe that breathtaking literary work necessitates American men sentimentally naming the hurt we've done, sourcing that hurt to one trauma, and getting congratulated, often by women, for "our honesty" at reckoning with that trauma while neglecting the suffering we cause”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“To talk about her love for me, or mine for her, would feel almost tautological; she has always defined my notion of what love is. Just like it’s meaningless to say our ordinary days were everything to me, because they were me. They composed me. They still do. I don’t know any self that exists apart from them.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“This pride comes from the same
internal place as the delusion I spent much of my young adulthood believing: that it
is better to be the one desired more, rather than the one doing more desiring. As if
love were a contest; as if desire were fixed, or absolute; as if either position could
insulate you from being harmed or causing harm; as if being in control could insulate
you from anything.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“Erica! The voice of Bill Rivers that day on the street goes through my mother’s heart like a stake. Erica, he says. (She thinks he says.) Tell me, what did you do with your glittering mind? Did you make the right choice? Marry the right man? Would you have studied at the Sorbonne, Erica? Laughed with writers at Les Deux Magots? Did you lock up that dazzling wit of yours, or did you write a book? Did you get to stroll in Paris? Would you care if your daughter were a perfect doll of a brown baby? Who would you love, Erica? Who would you be?”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“In between knowing something and refusing to know it lies a murky chasm that even the most enlightened among us are perfectly happy to inhabit.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence