Top 22 Ann Hood Quotes

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

I was a mother who worked ridiculously hard to keep catastrophe at bay. I didn’t allow my kids to eat hamburgers for fear of E. coli. I didn’t allow them to play with rope, string, balloons – anything that might strangle them. They had to bite grapes in half, avoid lollipops, eat only when I could watch them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was a daughterless mother. I had nowhere to put the things a mother places on her daughter. The nail polish I used to paint our toenails hardened. Our favorite videos gathered dust. Her small apron was in a box in the attic. Her shoes – the sparkly ones, the leopard rain boots, the ballet slippers – stood in a corner.

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

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.’

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

God does give us more than we can bear sometimes.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.