Jan Ellison Quotes

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...

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 carried on drinking excessively as long as I could—right up to the moment I decided to become a mother. It was not so difficult, then, to stop. The stakes changed, and you grew inside me, and the mu...

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...

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...

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...

Some new power had risen in me. All my tight cavities were opening and warning voices were fading. I had only myself to worry about, and if I wanted, I could simply choose not to worry at all.

When you seek it, you cannot find it. We

He was so appealing, standing there, so useful and solid and familiar, I wanted to fall into him and demand to be forgiven.

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...

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...

Where were all the people I loved? I could feel them, flung about, the distance between us a crushing weight that I myself had put there.

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.

The photo is there in the hatbox, evidence that all the people I love best in the world were once in the same house, at the same time, healthy and whole, celebrating the season together.

Perhaps it was the same cocktail of self-indulgence and abandon and want—and an unaccountable wish to be free, if only for a little while—I discovered in myself last summer. I

But is truth the same as memory?

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

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

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

Actually, when a tree falls, it creates shock waves. And when the shock waves reach an ear or an artificial mechanism like a microphone, they’re transmitted into what we call sound, you said. The shoc...