Top 40 Ashley Audrain Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “She’d once heard them described as the whispers – the moments that are trying to tell you something isn’t right here. The problem is that some women aren’t listening to what their lives are trying to tell them. They don’t hear the whispers until they’re looking back with hindsight. Feeling blindsided. Desperate to see the truth for what it is.”

— Ashley Audrain

3. “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.”

— Ashley Audrain

4. “She tried very hard to be the woman she was expected to be.”

— Ashley Audrain

5. “Your house glows at night like everything inside is on fire.”

— Ashley Audrain

6. “I forever take you, my best friend and my soul mate, to be my partner in life, through everything that’s hard, and the tens of thousands of days that fall somewhere in between. You, Fox Connor, are the person I love. I commit myself to you.”

— Ashley Audrain

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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.”

— Ashley Audrain

10. “She had a remarkable ability to make me hate myself.”

— Ashley Audrain

11. “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

12. “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.” She paused and looked only at me. “Listen for each other’s heartbeat in the current. You’ll always find each other. And then you’ll always find the shore.”

— Ashley Audrain

13. “I remember one day realizing how important my body was to our family. Not my intellect, not my ambitions of a writing career. Not the person shaped by thirty-five years. Just my body.”

— Ashley Audrain

14. “I desperately wanted more time to myself. I wanted a break from her. These seemed like reasonable requests to me, but you made me feel like I still had to prove myself to you. Your lingering doubt, although it was silent, was so heavy that sometimes it was hard to breathe around you.”

— Ashley Audrain

15. “We’ll be happy here,” I whispered and rubbed my socked feet over yours. “I thought we always were.”

— Ashley Audrain

16. “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

17. “She says this number to herself over and over, so she doesn’t forget: 3,680 days. How many times has she felt the weight of him on her, on her hip, in her arms, on her back? 3,680 days. How many times has she told him she loves him? This number feels important. Tombstones should be etched with total number of days lived instead of dates, she thinks; the dates mean nothing.”

— Ashley Audrain

18. “Mothers aren’t supposed to have children who suffer. We aren’t supposed to have children who die. And we are not supposed to make bad people.”

— Ashley Audrain

19. “These are thoughts I never let leave my lips. These are thoughts most mothers don’t have.”

— Ashley Audrain

20. “I am capable of moving beyond my mistakes. I am able to heal from the hurt and pain I have caused.”

— Ashley Audrain

21. “For the first time then, Cecilia realized she had a kind of power over Etta. She could make her angry. She could make her lose control. She could have gone upstairs and pretended to try again, but she wanted to see how far Etta would go if she ignored her. They were trading gunfire.”

— Ashley Audrain

22. “Yes, I’m very sad. But you know what? God has a way of taking care of things.” I nodded as though I understood, as though God were someone I trusted, too.”

— Ashley Audrain

23. “There is no value in simply being busy – everyone these days is busy. There is value in focus. In the satisfaction of control and the productivity of lucrative work.”

— Ashley Audrain

24. “We are all grown from something. We carry on the seed, and I was a part of her garden.”

— Ashley Audrain

25. “She understood in that moment something about him that she had not wanted to be true. But there are risks people take when they want something badly enough.”

— Ashley Audrain

26. “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

27. “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

28. “I’m glad you have Gemma in your life. I brought you to meet Mrs. Ellington so you could see that I understand. I want you to feel loved by someone you trust. Someone you can turn to. And that person doesn’t have to be me, if you don’t want it to be.”

— Ashley Audrain

29. “I’d passed whatever test you were putting me through. We desperately wanted life to feel good; we both had hope that it could.”

— Ashley Audrain

30. “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

31. “You had become a brighter version of the man I knew. I yearned for those things to happen to me, too. But I had become hardened. My face looked angry and tired where life had once lifted my cheekbones and glowed through my blue eyes. I looked like my mother had, right before she left me.”

— Ashley Audrain

32. “I didn’t want Mrs. Ellington to know how much it hurt to see my mother. Happy. Beautiful. Better without me.”

— Ashley Audrain

33. “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

34. “Violet quietly watched my shape.”

— Ashley Audrain

35. “We had only one version of the truth.”

— Ashley Audrain

36. “Violet cried only when she was with me; it felt like a betrayal. We were supposed to want each other.”

— Ashley Audrain

37. “We kept busy and I kept quiet. Were there good moments? Of course.”

— Ashley Audrain

38. “We’re all entitled to have certain expectations of each other and of ourselves. Motherhood is no different. We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be, good mothers.”

— Ashley Audrain

39. “She’d once heard them described as the whispers – the moments that are trying to tell you something isn’t right here.”

— Ashley Audrain

40. “I suppose I wasn’t ready to be invisible yet. Not then.”

— Ashley Audrain

41. “I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of woman a husband cheated on. And despite my ten years of resentment for the relationship you and Violet shared, I didn’t want her to believe you were the kind of man who would do that.”

— Ashley Audrain

42. “I learned very early on that being different from them didn’t feel good.”

— Ashley Audrain