Eileen Simpson famous quotes

in coming to terms with the newly dead, I seem to have agitated the spirits of the long dead. They were stirring uneasily in their graves, demanding to be mourned as I had not mourned them when they were buried. I was plunged into retroactive grief for my father, and could no longer deny, though I still tried, the loss I'd suffered at the death of my mother. ... Was it possible ... that one could mourn over losses that had occurred more than half a century earlier?
-- Eileen Simpson

#Mother #Father #Grief

Emotional damage is never easy to measure, but mothers who are alive but psychically absent impose filial burdens which knot their children's feelings in a way biologic orphans are spared.
-- Eileen Simpson

#Mother #Children #Emotional

The United States, which has been called the home of the persecuted and the dispossessed, has been since its founding an asylum for emotional orphans. For over three hundred years, refugees from political oppression, religious persecution, famine, poverty, and a rigid class system which limited educational and economic opportunities have been leaving their native villages and cities and coming to the United States in search of freedom and a better life.
-- Eileen Simpson

#Religious #Educational #Home

Mothers are inscrutable beings to their sons, always.

Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.

Don't let's go to the dogs tonight, For mother will be there.

Growing up my mother played Sarah Vaughan and Nat Cole in the house regularly.

When mother is happy, family is happy. When family is happy, nation is happy.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'

When I cannot understand my Father's leading, And it seems to be but hard and cruel fate, Still I hear that gentle whisper ever pleading, God is working, God is faithful-Only wait.

It should have great meaning that of all the titles of respect and honor and admiration that could be given him, that God himself, he who is the highest of all, chose to be addressed simply as “Father.”

Give me a land of boughs in leaf A land of trees that stand; Where trees are fallen there is grief; I love no leafless land.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.