Top 46 Kelly Corrigan Quotes
#1. My dad did a load a day, folding it in front of whatever Eagles, Flyers, or 76ers game was on TV.
Kelly Corrigan
#2. 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
#3. Mothering you is the first thing of consequence I have ever done.
Kelly Corrigan
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children.
Kelly Corrigan
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. It's clear to you immediately that you can have anything you want when you have cancer.
Kelly Corrigan
#11. That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages
becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors.
Kelly Corrigan
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I didn't know adults could be changed. I thought they were finished pieces, baked through and kiln dried.
Kelly Corrigan
#22. 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
#23. Being a kid is all about learning to bide time, proving just how unnatural it is to delay gratification.
Kelly Corrigan
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Pel-i-cans, their beaks hold more than their bellies can.
Kelly Corrigan
#27. 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
#28. I realized that making people feel irreplaceable was his gift.
Kelly Corrigan
#29. 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
#30. (Motherhood) I want her to have this thing I have that's so ordinary and tedious and aggravating, and then, so divine.
Kelly Corrigan
#31. 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
#32. He loved me the way only a nineteen-year old can- suddenly and deliriously.
Kelly Corrigan
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. Shortly before I turned 37 and my older daughter turned 3, I was diagnosed with breast cancer: stage III of IV.
Kelly Corrigan
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. How seriously can I take myself? I'm just one of six billion people, right?
Kelly Corrigan
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. It's easy to love kids who make you feel competent.
Kelly Corrigan
#45. 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
#46. 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
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