117 Quotes by Kelly Corrigan

At first parenthood was as I had expected, exhausting, sometimes heinous, and occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow.

The other problem with language is that arranging words into sentences requires we flip on our thinking machine, which necessarily claims some of our focus, so that as soon as we start deciding how to explain a feeling, we're not entirely feeling the feeling anymore, and some feelings want to be felt at full capacity.

Why we don't value intellectual honesty beyond easy answers is beyond me.

The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she's gone, it's a whole different game.

Maybe that's what happens, you go places and do things that are beyond your parents' capacity to imagine or understand, and that's how you start thinking of them as quaint and peripheral.

Is there a broth more restoring than company?

This profound sense of loss is as devastating as the urgent feeling that focus on the future is necessary. The two feelings, loss and hope, hit us simultaneously.

He didn't understand the way my projects made me tingle with can-do. He couldn't see that each undertaking I "finished" left me drunk with accomplishment. He'd never be able to appreciate that for a mother, the most elusive, exhilarating buzz was fixing.

There's no expectation of some linear progression from agony to okayness. It goes in circles. It's sloppy.