Wayward Quotes

“When I turned fifty, I was divorced, my son was grown up, and I realized I still had decades to go. It was the oddest thing—just as the culture began to lose interest in me, just as the world decided I was irrelevant, I began to feel more myself than ever. Louder, smarter, stronger. It felt truly adolescent, like I wanted to take drugs and drive fast and shave my head.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“What you don’t get from having a mother versus being a mother is how consuming it was, how profoundly one-sided. The child’s job was to need her mother less and less, a progression toward independence. But the mother’s job was to always help, always be there when needed, and never, ever stop worrying.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“In your whole life, only in young childhood, and only if you were very fortunate, could you get a measure of innocence—a time free of knowing what will come, of what must come. Those moments, that simple engagement of only what was wonderful about being alive, that love, really, would be at the center of you forever; deep inside, you would have this tender core that believed everything would be okay.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Sam knew that after her mother died, the last worries and pains would fall away. Sam would see her mother as not merely her mother, but as a full, perfect human. Sam would apprehend the whole of her mother's life, her girlhood through her old age, the whole of her body, her mind, her heart. Her existence on earth would be clear and perfect. Sam was from her, a part of her, and Sam would feel, in a profound way, that she remained a version of her, a derivative. This soothed Sam, to feel her mother's traces in every molecule, her light in every aspect. Her mother would die, but Sam would still be here. She didn't quite believe it yet, but she knew it just the same.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Sam knew that her love for Ally distorted the view of her. Sam was always shocked when the world didn’t fall out at Ally’s feet. Sometimes Sam wondered - if Ally was another person’s daughter, would I even like her? But she couldn’t actually imagine that. It was impossible for her brain to have perspective on her girl; it was like not being able to smell your own breath. The ferocity of Sam‘s attachment was what made Sam feel like herself.

From the moment Ally was born, pushed out of Sam‘s body (nothing could be more common that motherhood and yet nothing about it could ever ever be banal), Ally became Sam’s sun, Sam’s primary concern. She felt a directedness and a purpose and a meaning she had never experienced before. Another way of putting it: it was the least fake feeling she had ever had, the most earnest. Did all mothers feel this way? Did fathers feel this way? No, yes, doesn’t matter. On some level, It was Ally and then there was every other human on the earth.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“The Mid was the time when all her gestures feltunbearably sad and futile. And when heat suffocated her. Sam pulled at the neck of her T-shirt, pulled it down and away from her chest. Her body knew what was coming. Her heartbeat picked up speed. And then the hot. A sudden interior flame had bloomed in her., Her heart beat so fast she could hear it in her ears.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“MH turned to Sam. “When I turned 50, I was divorced, my son was grown up, and I realised I still had decades to go. It was the oddest thing - just as the culture began to lose interest in me, just as the world decided I was irrelevant, I began to feel more myself than ever. Louder, smarter, stronger. It felt truly adolescent, like I wanted to take drugs and drive fast and shave my head.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Sollte ein Körper nicht gezeichnet sein von allem, was einem widerfahren war, was man gesehen oder gefühlt hatte?”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Always she liked to imagine herself as subtly different from everyone else, enjoying the tension and mystique of being ordinary on the surface but with a radical, original interior life.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Yet somehow living as a 1912 woman or as an 1860 woman involved being on Facebook a lot.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“I want things to be normal. I want you to call me and tell me about your life. I want to hear about Ally, and I want to talk politics. I want to garden, and walk my dog. I want my life as it is and and as it has been, until I die.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Only recently did it dawn on me all the things I will never do: I will never have an apartment in Rome. I will never have another lover. I will never radically change my life again.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“Why was so much noticed only in the breach, in the loss, by the regret-filled longing for what was left behind?”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“She herself had done little all day; instead she reported from the edge of an unlived life.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“One thing you discover in motherhood that you never understood from being a daughter and loving your mother—the mother end of things went deeper. After you gave birth, no sleep ever again would take you far from your child.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward

“she knew part of what made Facebook—and the internet, really—addicting was simultaneously indulging your own obsessions while mocking (deriding, denouncing even) the obsessions of others from the safety of your screen.”
― Dana Spiotta, Wayward