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Mary Cantwell Quotes

Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor's.

Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor's.

Mary Cantwell
Dream, Garden, Thinking

Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cure. Silence, and no connections except to landscape.

Mary Cantwell
Happiness, Silence, Landscape
Mary Cantwell (1995). “Manhattan, When I Was Young”, p.89, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Mystery fiction is, after all, a substitute for tranquilizers, strong drink, and bad, if diverting, companions. One slips into bed ... onto the train ... into the chair in the sickroom ... and is suddenly transported to a place where light fights dark and wins. When the story's over, one is left without a hangover, without remorse. Can any other opiate make that claim?

Mary Cantwell
Strong, Hangover, Dark

Meanwhile, as we read, two little girls slept as if couched on zephyrs on the south side of the parlor floor, in a room that had bunny wallpaper...and a bookcase crammed with the collected Beatrix Potter. Snow White was in a youth bed and Rose Red was in a crib, and next to them was the little blue and white guest room that one of them would have one day. Because I recognize emotions only in retrospect, I didn't know that I was happy. As always, there was something nagging at my mind's corners. But I did know that I had all that it is proper in this world to wish for.

Mary Cantwell
Happiness, Girl, Blue

I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time.

Mary Cantwell
Happiness, Moving, Who I Am
Mary Cantwell (1995). “Manhattan, when I was Young”, p.88, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I was, after all, the daughter of a man who believed that to be involved with books was to live at the heart of light, and the former wife of a man who shared his faith.

Mary Cantwell
Book, Heart, Light
"Manhattan Memoir".

Like most people, most Westerners anyway, I have a sneaking suspicion I am immortal.

Mary Cantwell
People, Immortality, Suspicion
Mary Cantwell (1995). “Manhattan, When I Was Young”, p.112, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

the hymns were born in the fifteenth or sixteenth century or earlier, and listening to them was like licking an icicle: the same chill, the same purity.

Mary Cantwell
Music, Hymns, Listening
Mary Cantwell (1992). “Manhattan Memoir”, Penguin Group USA

In giving our daughter life, her father and I had also given her death, something I hadn't realized until that new creature flailed her arms in what was now infinite space. We had given her disease and speeding cars and flying cornices: once out of the fortress that had been myself, she would never be safe again ... We disappoint our kids and they disappoint us, and sometimes they grow up into people we don't like very much. We go on loving, though what we love may be more memory than actuality. And until the day we die we fear the phone that rings in the middle of the night.

Mary Cantwell
Daughter, Growing Up, Memories

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