Kelly Corrigan Quotes & Sayings

I didn't know adults could be changed. I thought they were finished pieces, baked through and kiln dried. — Kelly Corrigan

I remember a lecture from one of my lit classes about a theory called "Reader Response", which basically says: More often than not, it's the readers --- not the writers --- who determine what a book means. — Kelly Corrigan

I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day. — Kelly Corrigan

Mothering you is the first thing of consequence I have ever done. — Kelly Corrigan

I almost threw up the first time I set foot inside the University of California, San Francisco's Comprehensive Care Center and joined the stream of thin, slow-moving, low-voiced, gray-skinned people. I didn't want to be one of the pitied, the struck-down. — Kelly Corrigan

It is one thing to be a man's wife - quite another to be the mother of his children. In fact, once you become a mother, being a wife seems like a game you once played or a self-help book you were overly impressed with as a teenager that on second reading is puffy with common ideas. This was one of the many things I had learned since crossing over into the middle place - that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap. — Kelly Corrigan

You have to speak your dream out loud. — Kelly Corrigan

It's easy to love kids who make you feel competent. — Kelly Corrigan

I envy my dad and his faith. I envy all people who have someone to beseech, who know where they're going, who sleep under the fluffy white comforter of belief. — Kelly Corrigan

Shortly before I turned 37 and my older daughter turned 3, I was diagnosed with breast cancer: stage III of IV. — Kelly Corrigan

I have to pick up my kids. I have to register them for school. I have to pack their lunches and get their Hep B shots and wash their hands. They must be spotted on the stairs and potty trained and broken of the binkie. And if that relentless work runs right alongside gauging the risks of bladder surgery on a seventy-four-year-old, well, what did you think was gonna happen? What did you think being an adult was? — Kelly Corrigan

I am your mother. The first mile of your road. Me, and all of my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give you what was given to me. A decent childhood. More good memories than bad. Some values. A sense of tribe. A run at happiness. — Kelly Corrigan

I shift my position on the sofa, so my head is on a big, lumpy pillow in Greenie's lap and Georgia is leanign back against my middle and Claire is just about asleep on the floor. Allison and I catch eyes, and she tilts her head and smiles, and when I smile back, we both well up with tears, I think beause we both recognize that whatever else may be unfolding, this is happiness. — Kelly Corrigan

My readers often say to me, 'If we lived next door to each other, we'd be best friends.' That is precisely what I wanted to say to smart, funny, self-effacing Ellen McCarthy after I finished reading The Real Thing. I loved every lesson laid out in a book that wouldn't dare to call itself a field guide to marriage but amounts to as much on every page. This is a deeply useful little book. — Kelly Corrigan

This tug-of-war often obscures what's also happening between us. I am your mother, the first mile of your road. Me and all my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give to you what was given to me: a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of tribe, a run at happiness. You can't imagine how seriously I take that - even as I fail you. Mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done. — Kelly Corrigan

I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children. — Kelly Corrigan

Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her. — Kelly Corrigan

We'll bury our mothers and fathers - shuttling our children off for sleepovers, jumping on red-eyes, telling eachother stories that hurt to hear, about gasping, agonal breaths, hospice nurses, scars and bruises and scabs, and how skin papers shortly after a person passes. We will nod in agreement that it is as much an honor to witness a person leave this world as it is to watch a person come into it. — Kelly Corrigan

If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you're making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can't find a towel or a sponge or your "inside" voice. — Kelly Corrigan

I moved from Philadelphia to California when I was 25, after traveling abroad for a year. I thought I'd come home eventually and settle down, but I didn't. — Kelly Corrigan

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. — Kelly Corrigan

My default answer to everything is no. As soon as I hear the inflection of inquiry in your voice, the word no forms in my mind, sometimes accompanies by a reason, often not. Can I open the mail? No. Can I wear your necklace? No. When is dinner? No. What you probably wouldn't believe is how much I want to say yes. Yes, you can take two dozen books home from the library. Yes, you can eat the whole roll of SweeTarts. Yes, you can camp out on the deck. But the books will get lost, and SweeTarts will eventually make your tongue bleed, and if you sleep on the deck, the neighborhood racoons will nibble on you. I often wish I could come back to life as your uncle, so I could give you more. But, when you're the mom, your whole life is holding the rope against those wily secret agents who never, ever stop trying to get you to drop your end. — Kelly Corrigan

I've had cancer twice and if I had to pick one fate for you, cancer or fertility problems-I'd pick cancer. — Kelly Corrigan

Your father's the glitter but I'm the glue. — Kelly Corrigan

But the smell of the hospital, the sting of those overhead lights in the night, the snippets of conversations I had overheard, stayed with me and marked the beginning of how I came to know what a bold and dangerous thing parenthood is. Risk was not an event we had survived, but the place where we now lived. — Kelly Corrigan

Moms in fiction and memoir get a bad rap. — Kelly Corrigan

I don't know what to saw about a man who calls a perfectly adorable three-year old a fucker, but "my hero" comes to mind. — Kelly Corrigan

It's clear to you immediately that you can have anything you want when you have cancer. — Kelly Corrigan

He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime. — Kelly Corrigan

The thing about mothers, I want to say, is that once the containment ends and one becomes two, you don't always fit together so nicely ... The living mother-daughter relationship, you learn over and over again, is a constant choice between adaptation and acceptance. — Kelly Corrigan

Pel-i-cans, their beaks hold more than their bellies can. — Kelly Corrigan

Growing up, I saw my mother cry exactly once. The morning of her brother's funeral. One long tear ran down her cheek through her make up until she caught it near her mouth and patted it dry with a tissue she pulled from inside her sleeve. — Kelly Corrigan

Being a kid is all about learning to bide time, proving just how unnatural it is to delay gratification. — Kelly Corrigan

It's funny, I'd rather be known as a writer who crafted a really nice piece about women's friendships over time. But that doesn't roll off the tongue like 'YouTube sensation.' — Kelly Corrigan

You fly from thermal to thermal looking for lift. — Kelly Corrigan

Raising people is not some lark. It's serious work with serious repercussions. It's air-traffic control. You can't step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle. — Kelly Corrigan

Even when all the paperwork-a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns-clearly indicates you're an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you're still somebody's daughter. — 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. — Kelly Corrigan

Appreciation is the purest,strongest form of love. It is the outward-bound kind of love that asks for nothing and gives everything. — Kelly Corrigan

And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn't because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much. — Kelly Corrigan

He loved me the way only a nineteen-year old can- suddenly and deliriously. — Kelly Corrigan

I snap and storm around and then spend long nights thinking of the most damaged adults I know and wondering if my particular brand of maternal fuckups are how they ended up like that. — Kelly Corrigan

When you are in pain, and you see someone else in pain, there is really nothing as satisfying as giving them comfort in the night. — Kelly Corrigan

But now I see there's no such thing as "a" woman, "one" woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should have figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all the Motherness blocking out everything else? — Kelly Corrigan

How seriously can I take myself? I'm just one of six billion people, right? — Kelly Corrigan

Do you know that I love you enough to take in the full reality of your lives? That I can understand the things you think I can't and I can see and know and embrace every bit of you, full frame, no cropping? — Kelly Corrigan

Cancer is a growth hormone for empathy, and empathy makes us useful to each other in ways we were not, could not have been, before. — Kelly Corrigan

(Motherhood) I want her to have this thing I have that's so ordinary and tedious and aggravating, and then, so divine. — Kelly Corrigan

The only mothers who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, distort, neglect, baffle, appall, inhibit, incite, insult, or age poorly are dead mothers, perfectly contained in photographs, pressed into two dimensions like a golden autumn leaf. — Kelly Corrigan

The truth is, I'd like to be closer to my kids. I'd like to share more with them. But that's not what this time in their lives is about. This is their time to separate, to self-direct, to become independent. — Kelly Corrigan

Or maybe, knowing that intercourse involved certain unsavory sights, smells, and sounds, God deliberately left the ingredients for alcohol lying around where man would undoubtedly find them. — Kelly Corrigan

I realized that making people feel irreplaceable was his gift. — Kelly Corrigan

My dad did a load a day, folding it in front of whatever Eagles, Flyers, or 76ers game was on TV. — Kelly Corrigan

That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages
becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors. — Kelly Corrigan

But given everything I do know, no matter how hard it is, how lonely or stressful, still, I would not want to leave this earth without being a mother. — Kelly Corrigan