Quotes from Ann Hood

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

God does give us more than we can bear sometimes.

My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.' 'Well, good for you,' I thought. 'I'm going to go home and scream.'

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.

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.

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

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

No mother should lose her child.

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.

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.

Time passes and I am still not through it. Grief isn't something you get over. You live with it. You go on on with it lodged in you. Sometimes I feel like I have swallowed a pile of stones. Grief makes me heavy. It makes me slow. Even on days when I laugh a lot, or dance, or finish a project, or meet a deadline, or celebrate, or make love, it is there. Lodged deep inside of me.

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

Don't waste your one beautiful life.

love is reliable. infatuation is temporary.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

all that was missing...was everything else? Ann Hood, the Knitting Circle

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

All that was missing... was everything else.