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The Push QUOTES

The Push QUOTES

1 " You want them and grow them and push them out, but they happen to you. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

2 " They put her on my bare chest. She felt like a warm loaf of screaming bread. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

3 " A mother’s heart breaks a million ways in her lifetime. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

4 " We could have counted our problems on the petals of the daisy in my bouquet, but it wouldn’t be long before we were lost in a field of them. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

5 " It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. . . . "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

6 " You used to care about me as a person—my happiness, the things that made me thrive. Now I was a service provider. You didn’t see me as a woman. I was just the mother of your child. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

7 " Marriages can float apart. Sometimes we don’t notice how far we’ve gone until all of a sudden, the water meets the horizon and it feels like we’ll never make it back. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

8 " You know, there’s a lot about ourselves that we can’t change—it’s just the way we’re born. But some parts of us are shaped by what we see. And how we’re treated by other people. How we’re made to feel. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

9 " I don’t want you learning to be like me. But I don’t know how to teach you to be anyone different. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

10 " But I was on the cusp of the age when women worry about disappearing to everyone but themselves, blending in with their sensible hair, their practical coats. I see them walk down the street every day as though they’re ghosts. I suppose I wasn’t ready to be invisible yet. Not then. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

11 " we had both morphed into a version of ourselves that didn’t feel as good as had been advertised. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

12 " These are thoughts I never let leave my lips. These are thoughts most mothers don't have. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

13 " actions on a loop. Change the diaper. Make the formula. Warm the bottle. Pour the Cheerios. Wipe up the mess. Negotiate. Beg. Change his sleeper. Get her clothes out. Where’s the lunch box? Bundle them up. Walk. Faster. We’re late. Hug her good-bye. Push the swing. Find the lost mitten. Rub the pinched finger. Give him a snack. Get another bottle. Kiss, kiss, kiss. Put him in the crib. Clean. Tidy. Find. Make. Defrost the chicken. Get him up from the crib. Kiss, kiss, kiss. Change his diaper. Put him in the high chair. Clean up his face. Wash the dishes. Tickle. Change the diaper. Tickle. Put the snacks in a baggie. Start the washing machine. Bundle him up. Buy diapers. And dish soap. Race for pickup. Hello, hello! Hurry, hurry. Unbundle. Laundry in the dryer. Turn on her show. Time-out. Please. Listen to my words. No! Stain remover. Diaper. Dinner. Dishes. Answer the question again and again. Run the bath. Take off their clothes. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

14 " The lie was necessary, like the scattering of other lies I’d told so that you didn’t suspect just how fucked up my family was. Family was too important to you—neither of us could risk how the whole truth about mine might change the way you saw me. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

15 " I couldn’t tell you the truth: that I believed there was something wrong with our daughter. You thought the problem was me. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

16 " But looking at a photograph of oneself is not proof of an affair. And asking a question about a type of flower is not proof of an affair. Thes are, though, the kinds of things that fester in a person's mind until she no longer feels loved; they are the happenings that took us from a place we could have survived, even in the grave face of death that nearly killed me, too, to the place we simply could not com eback from. These things became too heavy and too hurtful, habitual abuses in what once felt like the safest place in the world. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

17 " She tried very hard to be the woman she was expected to be. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

18 " I looked up and felt nothing for you—not love, not hate, not anything in between. Is this what the end was supposed to feel like? There are people who work through it, who fight for one another, who do it for the children. The life they thought they needed. But I had nothing to fuel the fire. Nothing to give. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

19 " Your unconditional belief in me felt magical. I desperately wanted to prove to myself that I was as good as you thought I was. "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push

20 " A mother’s heart breaks a million ways in her lifetime "

― Ashley Audrain , The Push