Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 27 quotes that I liked and saved while reading The Frozen River book by Ariel Lawhon. I hope you will like them too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
The Frozen River Quotes
- A woman is never more vulnerable than while in labor. Nor is she ever stronger. Like a wounded animal, cornered and desperate, she spends her travail alternately curled in upon herself or lashing out. It ought to kill a woman, this process of having her body turned inside out. By rights, no one should survive such a thing. And yet, miraculously, they do, time and again.
- Pretty faces and misfortune often go hand in hand.
- My husband is fond of saying that I am not generous with my smiles, that they must be earned, but I think that is unfair. There is usually just so little to smile about.
- I have brought nine children into this world, after all, and only six are still living. Like all mothers, I have long since mastered the art of nursing joy at one breast and grief at the other.
- I have never met a grown man who, when thwarted like a child, doesn’t act like one.
- As a midwife and healer, I am witness to the details of my neighbors’ private lives, along with their fears and secrets, and – when appropriate – I record them for safekeeping. Memory is a wicked thing that warps and twists. But paper and ink receive the truth without emotion, and they read it back without partiality. That, I believe, is why so few women are taught to read and write. God only knows what they would do with the power of pen and ink at their disposal.
- This is the trouble faced by any woman who sets pen to paper in a busy household. I am never guaranteed the certainty of quiet, much less a solid length of time to chase my thoughts and bind them together. That is the luxury of men with libraries, butlers, and wives. Mothers find a different way to get their work done.
- This is what it means to age, I think. The days are long, but the years are short.
- Any man worth his salt knows it’s a woman who does the choosing. And anyone who thinks differently is a fool.
- I am not a woman given easily to tears. They’re useless things that serve only to make your voice waver and your cheeks wet.
- We are in the twilight years of a long love affair, and it has recently occurred to me that a day will come when one of us buries the other. But, I remind myself, that is the happy ending to a story like ours. It is a vow made and kept. Till death do us part. It is the only acceptable outcome to a long and happy marriage, and I am determined not to fear that day, whenever it arrives. I am equally determined to soak up all the days between.
- If I have a weakness for anything in this world it is a big, beautiful stallion.
- The act of mothering is not limited to the bearing of children. This is another thing that I have learned in all my long years of midwifery. Labor may render every woman a novice, but pregnancy renders every woman a child. Scared. Vulnerable. Ill. Exhausted. Frail. A pregnant woman is, in most ways, a helpless woman. Her emotions are erratic. Her body betrays her.
- The joy of having sons is that they worship their mothers. Until one day, suddenly, they don’t. I am not like you, he realizes. We are different. Then, that boy – once small and sweet – begins the long, hard process of separation, until at last he rips the seam. But the holes where mother and son were once knit together remain.
- One of the greatest skills that I have as a midwife is to sit in silence. I cannot count the number of times that I have wordlessly held a hand as grief explodes in a room. The only antidote to this kind of despair is to create a bulwark of immovable calm. To sit and be. To pray and offer comfort. To watch the shadows cut tracks along the wall as the sun slowly moves across the sky. To say nothing when there are no words that can console.
- This is a new thing I’ve discovered about myself in recent years. The noises. Stand and groan. Sit and grunt. Some days it seems that I can hardly take a step without some part of my body creaking or cracking and this – even more than the gray hairs and the crow’s-feet at my eyes – makes me feel as though I am racing down the final stretch of middle age.
- There are few things that I enjoy more than making a young man blush.
- It is easy to assume that for a birth to go badly, something specific must go wrong. A breech presentation. A hemorrhage. An infection. I have faced all these difficulties, and more, but it is often the mortal threat of exhaustion that can cause a woman’s life to ebb away. There is no condition on earth more draining than that of labor, and few ways to rouse a woman once she has succumbed to exhaustion.
- Though you never think it possible, you can celebrate and grieve in the same breath. It is a holy abomination.
- I have long since learned not to raise a woman’s hopes. If they want one thing, they’ll almost certainly get the other.
- You can give a man all the time in the world, but he’s never ready for his daughter to turn up pregnant.
- I know nothing about motherhood other than children will do what they will do and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.
- I cannot say why it is so important that I make this daily record. Perhaps because I have been doing so for years on end? Or maybe – if I am being honest – it is because these markings of ink and paper will one day be the only proof that I have existed in this world. That I lived and breathed. That I loved a man and the many children he gave me. It is not that I want to be remembered, per se. I have done nothing remarkable. Not by the standards of history, at least. But I am here. And these words are the mark I will leave behind. So yes, it matters that I continue this ritual.
- We are midwives. We will sleep when we’re dead.
- The human body has a smell. Not just perspiration. Or defecation. Flatulence. Blood. But the deep parts of a person. Damp and earthy, tinged with the metallic bite of iron. All the moving, beating things that comprise our inmost being. They smell like the natural world, humid and verdant, like soil after the rain. But those are scents that a person rarely notices until a moment like this. Births. Accidents. Injuries. The various ways in which we are turned inside out.
- There are some losses in this life that we do not live long enough to fully grieve.
- An old farmer once told me that a wolf – once it’s gotten a taste for human blood – must be killed because it will never stop hunting people from that point forward. I think it’s the same with men – or at least some of them – and rape.