47 Quotes by Mary Alice Monroe

I wouldn’t be worth my salt as a mother if I didn’t pass on the family recipes.

This dog had shown more courage than I. This great, powerful, beautiful dog was willing to take a chance on me – a broken, depressed, lonely Marine.

One day she would recall this very twilit evening and the sight of her children dancing on the shore and then... Yes, then she would wish she had stopped to hold their chubby hands and play tag along with them.

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something – anything – before it is all gone. – John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent.

The secret to survival was in seeing the world through the eyes – and heart – of a child. That was Merry’s lesson to her sisters. To treasure life, and most of all, to love. Simply, unconditionally and with joyful abandon. To love without demanding or expecting anything in return.

A mother never hears the words “I hate you” without cringing and feeling like a hopeless failure.

But she had the chance now to make things right, at least for her daughter. She may have done a lot of things wrong, but the decision to give up her child would be the one responsible, unselfish act of her life. It was the best thing she’d ever done. But it felt like the worst.

After living at sea for twenty years or more, the female loggerhead returns to the beach of her birth to nest. She travels hundreds of miles through the Atlantic, her three-hundred-pound, eddish-brown carapace filled with hundreds of fertile eggs.

Research has found perceiving nature’s beauty to be a significant predictor of life satisfaction. In other words, the more one perceived nature’s beauty, the more one reported life satisfaction.