Jan Ellison Quotes

I should never have confessed. I should have wiped my one indiscretion—one indiscretion in more than twenty years—from my conscience,

We found a room in a motel close to the hospital, the Mermaid Inn, a pink stucco affliction squeezed between a Starbucks and an independent bookstore.

I would need to be not so much myself as the person I felt inside me who had so far not been unleashed. He

We can achieve happiness not by remaking ourselves, but by subverting unhappiness. By throwing it overboard.

But is truth the same as memory?

I became a great internal shrug. All my organs gave way to the path of least resistance. I felt myself dislocating, but the dislocation did not have the expected result. Instead of removing me, it mad...

Sunflowers face the sun all the time in the day even if the sun moves. They were not actually sunflowers—they were prince daisies—but I wasn’t going to correct her. Where did you learn that? I asked h...

Already I sensed that to claim him, to take something of him without asking, would be to drive him away. When

What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she...

When you seek it, you cannot find it. We

It’s true—I don’t really believe in mistakes. There’s only what you do, and what you don’t do, isn’t there? It was a mistake to the extent anything like that is a mistake. The before and after of it l...

I hoped with every mothering cell in my body. I hoped with every scrap of power and will, every particle of knowing you, the years and years of you, the joy and hurt, the work and pride, the worry and...

Knew it wasn’t the right kind of love, because it required nothing of me. I did not need to worry about keeping it alive or putting it out since it was kept alive quite independently of anything I mig...

I had the feeling I always have when God and death become entwined—that God is stepping in to steal the thunder of a human affair, a glorious union of flesh and blood, the miracle of two bodies making...

I don’t want something different, I said, and I meant it. And not just about the ring, but about our twenty-one years of marriage. The people we’d made. The life we’d shaped together, exactly the life...

People say a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. But what if the state of that child's happiness has become a mystery? What if that child is no longer a child but a young man who has rem...

Of course it is upon the rubble of ancient history that the present stands.

Your father flung his windbreaker over his shoulder and the zipper stung my cheek, the beginnings of retribution, perhaps, for a past that had long ago laid down the invisible blueprint of our future.

I was naked. I was human. I was fallible. I deserved to be forgiven. We all did. I

Want like a small dirty creature, waiting all the years of her marriage for a sign. Patrick was not the sign; she herself was, her own blue dress, her tiny waist, her small, round breasts. And her wan...