Ramona Ausubel Quotes & Sayings

It doesn't always make sense, how you go about loving someone. Sometimes loving means gathering them back, sometimes it means sending them away. — Ramona Ausubel

unless one bought her way out of it, motherhood was a small room with high walls and no door. — Ramona Ausubel

You are like a shell," he said. "A seashell. Hollow but beautiful."
"Hollow." She nodded.
For the rest of the day, they sat not far from each other, gazing out the window at the light shifting almost imperceptibly. They sat about and let themselves be objects on which dust might settle, air might past, light could play.
"I am just an emptiness," she said.
"No," he told her. "You are a resting place. — Ramona Ausubel

The privilege of money, as Edgar's parents saw it, was that you could get yourself into the great wild beauty - the thousand-meter-deep sea, the wide open West, an island inhabited mostly by dangerous animals, and feel alive and real - and then come over the crest of the hill and have someone meet you with a silver tray containing fresh fruit, aged scotch, a cold towel for your hands, and show you to a seat with a perfect view from which to tell the story of your adventure. — Ramona Ausubel

The children always needed Fern to be a different kind of mother than she had been the week before. They exhausted her and she longed for a break and then she missed them acutely the moment they were out of sight - that was the truth of motherhood. — Ramona Ausubel

He looked like someone trying to sell something for less than it was worth. — Ramona Ausubel

Life is effortful," said Mac. "That's the way it's supposed to be. It's good to have work to do. — Ramona Ausubel

There should be a word for this happiness, she thought. The happiness of nothing extra. — Ramona Ausubel

A person who wants to believe lives in a world full of proof. — Ramona Ausubel

Once upon a time, tomorrow was the first day of the world. — Ramona Ausubel

This was a season of worry and joy living side by side in Fern. They did not cancel each other out or blend to create a soft grey. Love could not temper fear and fear could not temper love. — Ramona Ausubel

It might still drown you, but love got deeper with time. — Ramona Ausubel

Nothing was more terrifying than what families could do to each other. — Ramona Ausubel

This dinosaur skeleton was a body plus time. They all were. The question was what they wanted to do and who they wanted to love in the years when muscle and skin still covered them. — Ramona Ausubel

The truest luxury of long-term wealth was that no one in the family thought about money anymore. — Ramona Ausubel

The process of living is to surrender what, for a few glimmering days or years, you have been allowed to hold. But there is no such place as gone. — Ramona Ausubel

Help, I said. "Is this real? Am I still me?"
The Stranger comforted, "Everything stays true. You are yourself, no matter how much you have to change."
But what had I done? I couldn't remember; I must have made each required movement ... I must have passed instinctively through the motions that somehow changed me from girl to woman. Although if there was such a transformation, I had not witnessed it. — Ramona Ausubel

You must have come from very far down," Alice says to the fish, "to have your own lantern. — Ramona Ausubel

The moment we were in was a hinge - the past swung on one side, the future on the other. — Ramona Ausubel

Being rich had felt to Edgar like treading alone for all of time in a beautiful, bottomless pool. So much, so blue, and nothing to push off from. No grit or sand, no sturdy earth, just his own constant movement to keep above the surface. It was easy to hate riches when they surrounded him, but Edgar did not know how to be any other kind of person. He did not know that in every life the work of want and survival was just as floorless, just as unstopping. — Ramona Ausubel

The only true thing is what's in front of you right now. — Ramona Ausubel

How furiously she loved them and how heavy it was to carry that quantity of love, how perilous to care for those delicate bodies in the spinning world. — Ramona Ausubel

You know that smell, when you put your nose up to a pine tree?" I told her I did perfectly. "No matter how long it has been, you always will. Like you are storing a part of that tree in your own body ... Everything stays true. You are yourself, no matter how much you have to change. — Ramona Ausubel

Time was a dazzling lie, a magician worth a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age at the same time. All the days of our lives were today. — Ramona Ausubel

Are we nothing but heel skin and blisters? Traveling a straight line to the end of our lives? — Ramona Ausubel

Perhaps fate is an answer from God ... or perhaps fate is nothing more than an accident - two ships lost in the dark, running aground on the same windward beach. — Ramona Ausubel

We can do a cremation here, at the house?" I ask.
"We built a fire," my father says.
"Obviously. And I put the whole cat in the fire?"
"There isn't a whole cat," my mother says.
"What is there?"
"Parts of cat," they say together.
"Bones?" I ask.
"Mostly. And some fur. And some face. — Ramona Ausubel

He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day. — Ramona Ausubel

For heartsickness of the unending variety, befriend a dove. Do not catch it, not even so that you can set it free. Just get down on the ground with bread crumbs on your chest and wait for it to find you interesting. — Ramona Ausubel

She did not try to explain aging or love and how much harder it was to keep trusting beauty the later it got. How, though she was only twenty-eight years old, she seemed to have passed into the long slide during which time a woman became less and less valuable, and to keep her around became an act of charity rather than pleasure. — Ramona Ausubel