Ramona Ausubel Quotes

The privilege of money, as Edgar's parents saw it, was that you could get yourself into the great wild beauty - the thousand-meter-deep sea, the wide open West, an island inhabited mostly by dangerous animals, and feel alive and real - and then come over the crest of the hill and have someone meet you with a silver tray containing fresh fruit, aged scotch, a cold towel for your hands, and show you to a seat with a perfect view from which to tell the story of your adventure.

The children always needed Fern to be a different kind of mother than she had been the week before. They exhausted her and she longed for a break and then she missed them acutely the moment they were out of sight - that was the truth of motherhood.

You are like a shell," he said. "A seashell. Hollow but beautiful."
"Hollow." She nodded.
For the rest of the day, they sat not far from each other, gazing out the window at the light shifting almost imperceptibly. They sat about and let themselves be objects on which dust might settle, air might past, light could play.
"I am just an emptiness," she said.
"No," he told her. "You are a resting place.

For heartsickness of the unending variety, befriend a dove. Do not catch it, not even so that you can set it free. Just get down on the ground with bread crumbs on your chest and wait for it to find you interesting.

She came from people who thought they were too good to run from the cold, too hearty, too real. Fern allowed herself only short dreams of summer, properly earned summer, after winter and after spring.

Nothing was more terrifying than what families could do to each other.

This was a season of worry and joy living side by side in Fern. They did not cancel each other out or blend to create a soft grey. Love could not temper fear and fear could not temper love.

The only true thing is what's in front of you right now.

He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day.

What are you doing?" the mother asked.

"I guess I'm throwing roses," the girl said, unable to make sense of herself.

unless one bought her way out of it, motherhood was a small room with high walls and no door.

The moment we were in was a hinge - the past swung on one side, the future on the other.

She did not try to explain aging or love and how much harder it was to keep trusting beauty the later it got. How, though she was only twenty-eight years old, she seemed to have passed into the long slide during which time a woman became less and less valuable, and to keep her around became an act of charity rather than pleasure.

Life is effortful," said Mac. "That's the way it's supposed to be. It's good to have work to do.

Perhaps fate is an answer from God ... or perhaps fate is nothing more than an accident - two ships lost in the dark, running aground on the same windward beach.

We can do a cremation here, at the house?" I ask.
"We built a fire," my father says.
"Obviously. And I put the whole cat in the fire?"
"There isn't a whole cat," my mother says.
"What is there?"
"Parts of cat," they say together.
"Bones?" I ask.
"Mostly. And some fur. And some face.