Ann Hood Quotes

#1. I know your face by touch when it's dark, I know the profile of your sleeping face, the sound of you sleeping.

Ann Hood

#2. I was kind of an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer - I just was one.

Ann Hood

#3. This was how to help a family who has just lost their child. Wash the clothes, make soup. Don't ask them what they need, bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant, and cry, and tell their story over and over.

Ann Hood

#4. Dead bodies do get a grayish blue/purple hue because blood pools in the capillaries and the body starts to decompose. It's not smurf blue, but it's not a pleasant shade.

Ann Hood

#5. Nothing can stop the words so well as the mute alphabet of knit and purl. The curl of your cupped hand scoops up long drinks of calm. The rhythm you find is from down inside, rocking cradle, heartbeat, ocean. Waves on a rockless shore.

Ann Hood

#6. Don't waste your one beautiful life.

Ann Hood

#7. She imagined books and this book group getting her through whatever was coming next.

Ann Hood

#8. I am a step mother, so how children deal with divorce is something I've witnessed first hand and thought about a lot.

Ann Hood

#9. I learned to knit in 2002, six months after my 5-year-old daughter, Grace, died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. I was unable to read or write, and friends suggested I take up knitting; almost immediately I fell under its spell.

Ann Hood

#10. For reasons I can't remember, my family eventually stopped attending church, and I started questioning the Catholic Church's beliefs. I dabbled a little, but nothing stuck.

Ann Hood

#11. God does give us more than we can bear sometimes.

Ann Hood

#12. No one who reads can ever be bored.

Ann Hood

#13. No mother should lose her child.

Ann Hood

#14. The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that?
Instead, she said, "I love you." She did. She loved him. But even that didn't feel like anything anymore.

Ann Hood

#15. A sibling is the lens through which you see your childhood.

Ann Hood

#16. Back when I was 8 or 9 and wanted to be a nun, I would often stop at church on my way home from school.

Ann Hood

#17. I often feel that I have a split personality. I love more than anything to be in my study writing, but when it's time to do a book tour, I love that extroverted part, too - talking to people, reading, traveling, going out into the world.

Ann Hood

#18. There are so many cruel decisions parents have to make when their child dies. The funeral director requested a sheet for the coffin, and I sent the cozy flannel one, pale blue with happy snowmen, that had just been put away with the winter linens.

Ann Hood

#19. I felt joined to all the men and women across cultures down through the ages who'd done something useful with their hands, who'd made essential things from whatever was in front of them.

Ann Hood

#20. Could a writer understand how her book had saved someone long ago, when the world was a fragile, scary place and the people she loved weren't in it anymore? Could a writer understand that her book had mattered more than anything?

Ann Hood

#21. No one can write like Cheryl Strayed.

Ann Hood

#22. In my adult life, I had spent a lot of time angry at God, mostly over the sudden deaths in my family - my brother at 30, my daughter at 5.

Ann Hood

#23. When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day.

Ann Hood

#24. I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses ... I am the proud wife beside her husband ... I am the writer who has written a new novel.

Ann Hood

#25. When I did get married and then had children, it was Beatles' songs I sang to them at night. As one of the youngest of 24 cousins, I had never held an infant or baby-sat. I didn't know any lullabies, so I sang Sam and Grace to sleep with 'I Will' and 'P.S. I Love You.'

Ann Hood

#26. When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a series published by Bobbs-Merrill called 'The Childhood of Famous Americans.' In it, historical figures like Clara Barton, Nancy Hanks, Elias Howe, Patrick Henry, and dozens more came to life for me as children.

Ann Hood

#27. I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.

Ann Hood

#28. When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not.

Ann Hood

#29. As an adult, I took ballet classes three times a week, and I believed it gave me better posture, a stronger body, and made me more graceful.

Ann Hood

#30. She understood that grief is not neat and orderly; it does not follow any rules. Time does not heal it. Rather time insists on passing and as it does, grief changes but does not go away.

Ann Hood

#31. If you want to feel like ginger ale Claire, drink a ginger ale.

Ann Hood

#32. Grief doesn't have a plot. It isn't smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.

Ann Hood

#33. You are lucky you are a writer because you will sort through this in ways other souls cannot; the bad part is you feel and see all of this in ways non-writers don't.

Ann Hood

#34. I am thrilled to write 'The Treasure Chest,' and to bring to life not only the childhoods of famous people from history, but also the characters of Maisie and Felix, who I hope you will fall in love with just as I have!

Ann Hood

#35. Don't waste your one beautiful life," Vivien said softly.

Ann Hood

#36. Time doesn't heal, I had learned, it just keeps moving. And it takes us with it.

Ann Hood

#37. My cousins and I used to play Beatle wives. We all wanted to be married to Paul, but John was O.K. too. None of us wanted Ringo. Or even worse, George.

Ann Hood

#38. love is reliable. infatuation is temporary.

Ann Hood

#39. After 9/11, new security measures not only added longer lines and earlier check-ins, but took away our privilege of carrying knitting needles or our favorite moisturizer on board with us. Although we want to be safe when we fly, in some ways it all just adds to the misery of our experience.

Ann Hood

#40. Grief made people guilty. Guilty for being five minutes late, for taking the wrong streetcar, for ignoring a couph or sleeping too soundly. Guilt and grief went hand in hand.

Ann Hood

#41. Since my brother died in 1982, my parents and I had formed a shaky tripod of a family; now that I'd lost my father too, it was too easy for me to glimpse a future point where I alone was the keeper of not just my own childhood memories, but of my family lore.

Ann Hood

#42. If watching your child die is a parent's worst nightmare, imagine having to tell your other child that his sister is dead ... Although I am certain that he cried, that we all cried, what I remember more is how we collapsed into each other, as if the weight of our loss literally crushed us.

Ann Hood

#43. I have learned that there is more power in a good strong hug than in a thousand meaningful words.

Ann Hood

#44. It mattered most to me then because of where I was in my life. So in a way, there isn't just one book that matters most, there might be several, or even a dozen.

Ann Hood

#45. Babies make you do things for them. They get you up and they get you moving.

Ann Hood

#46. All that was missing ... was everything else?
Ann Hood, the Knitting Circle

Ann Hood

#47. Follow love and it will flee;
Flee love and it will follow you.

Ann Hood

#48. I write so that people will read what I write. I don't want to write a book that a thousand people read, or just privileged people read. I want to write a book whose emotional truth people can understand. For me, that's what it's about.

Ann Hood

#49. When we deal with death, the pupils will always be fixed and dilated, which indicates that there is no longer brain activity or response.

Ann Hood

#50. As someone who has lived the nightmare of losing a child, I know that the enormous hole left behind remains forever.

Ann Hood

#51. Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God.

Ann Hood

#52. Everyone has read about or knows someone who has gone through fertility treatments. It is an emotional nightmare, fueled by false hope and the promise of a treatment that will work.

Ann Hood