Top 70 Ashley C. Ford Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We had been in a relationship for six years, and were best friends for longer. He was my safest place, and he knew that was the case, had seen it for himself. We didn’t know, back then, there are about a million ways to love and be loved by another person. We thought what we had, the way we had it, was the only way it could be. We were stuck.”

— Ashley C. Ford

2. “My mother wasn’t perfect. Our relationship was complicated, and difficult. She was my imperfect mother. We were two different people, and found that hard to accept in one another. But I was hers and she was mine. That’s how it had always been. Who would I be, if not hers? I didn’t want to be without her.”

— Ashley C. Ford

3. “We were a small underfunded school full of poor underserved kids, and even when we fought, we knew we were in it together and that we were all we had.”

— Ashley C. Ford

4. “I was an anxious driver. I was afraid of highways, and driving alone anywhere more than thirty minutes away scared me. Operating a vehicle is a lesson in individual control and mutual trust. I was skeptical of both.”

— Ashley C. Ford

5. “When she corrected me, she did so with obvious care, and that counted for a lot with me. Kids can always tell the difference between adults who want to empower them, and adults who want to overpower them. She was the former.”

— Ashley C. Ford

6. “We don’t give up on our people. We don’t stop loving them.” She looked into my face, her eyes watering at the bottoms. “Not even when we’re burning alive.”

— Ashley C. Ford

7. “Don’t. Ever. Give. A. Man. Your. Money.”

— Ashley C. Ford

8. “It reminded me of my father’s letters telling me I was the best, the greatest, the most beautiful, and the only one. I didn’t believe a word, but I believed that someone else did, and as long as I could maintain that, it would be enough for me.”

— Ashley C. Ford

9. “When I was four years old, I taught myself to lie awake until morning. I wanted the sunrise, and I only had to stay awake to have her. When children are small, our desires seem small, even if we want the sky. Anything we want seems to be only a matter of time and effort away. It’s too early to imagine what’s already holding you back.”

— Ashley C. Ford

10. “I did not know that there are miles between running out of things to say, and running out of the strength to say them.”

— Ashley C. Ford

11. “Feeling any of it felt like the beginning of losing control, and losing control felt like certain death in my body, if not my mind. If I didn’t process the feeling, I wouldn’t feel it, and if I didn’t feel it, it couldn’t kill me.”

— Ashley C. Ford

12. “I was tempted, as I always am, to take the bait when my mother offers me empathy. Tempted by my fantastical belief that one day I will lower my walls, and she will do the same. Then I end up blaming myself for not remembering to stick to the conversational paths offering the least resistance, furious at myself for veering too far into the unexplored or exiled.”

— Ashley C. Ford

13. “I learned to carry the secrets of my badness silently and alone. There would be no more confessions from me. Whoever wanted to know how bad I could be would have to get close enough to find out, and nobody tried.”

— Ashley C. Ford

14. “Yes, Ashley, she told me. Now why are you still in my face?” She knew what I wanted, and she wanted me to know it would not be mine. We were locked in a power struggle, not that I would have known to call it that, and I was confused because I did not want power from my mother. I wanted her to acknowledge the pain in my body and heart.”

— Ashley C. Ford

15. “It still felt good to be apologized to, no matter who it was meant for. Up until that point, no one had ever apologized for hitting me. I liked the way it made me feel, like I was worth feeling sorry over after someone hurt me, even if they didn’t mean it. Like it mattered that I hurt.”

— Ashley C. Ford

16. “I’ve heard people describe panic as something that rises up inside them. For me, panic radiates in the threads of my muscles, bangs in the back of my skull, twists my stomach, and sets my skin on fire. It doesn’t rise or fall. It spreads.”

— Ashley C. Ford

17. “We smiled at each other, big real smiles, and I forgot anything and anyone else.”

— Ashley C. Ford

18. “There was Mama, the loving mother we knew before whatever sparked her ire, and then there was Mother who showed up in her place.”

— Ashley C. Ford

19. “Ashley, you’re the only person who has to live in your skin, and wake up with the consequences of your choices. That’s why you can’t let other people make the big choices for you. You have to do what it feels right to do, and you can’t let anybody stop you.” I heard the stifled smile again. “Not even me.”

— Ashley C. Ford

20. “Despite everything my father had done, I was still so eager to be claimed by him. To be protected by him. To the world he was a bad man. To me, he was my dad who did a bad thing. I was still trying to figure out what it meant to love someone who had done such a bad thing, but I did love him. And that was enough for me to show up, and say so to his face.”

— Ashley C. Ford

21. “I am freer than you and that is worth all of the things I don’t have.”

— Ashley C. Ford

22. “No matter what you wanted to hide from yourself, you couldn’t hide it from the people whose particular brand of bent matched yours. The effort was moot. Weird kids always find each other.”

— Ashley C. Ford

23. “She knew what I wanted, and she wanted me to know it would not be mine. We were locked in a power struggle, not that I would have known to call it that, and I was confused because I did not want power from my mother. I wanted her to acknowledge the pain in my body and heart. I wanted it to mean something to her because she loved me, and I knew it, and I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just say sorry. What was so wrong with me that I didn’t deserve that?”

— Ashley C. Ford

24. “Brett was me because being me was too much sometimes, something I’d forgotten until that part was ripped away.”

— Ashley C. Ford

25. “When my life was new, I understood in my bones how little it mattered what anybody else was doing, or what they thought about what I was doing. I believed my bones then.”

— Ashley C. Ford

26. “For many years, I just didn’t try. The few times I did, for special occasions or at the behest of my grandmother, felt unnatural and like everyone could see how uncomfortable I was in my skin. Even if I looked glamorous in the moment, it seemed I was out of my body and keenly aware of everyone else’s eyes on me. Being on anyone’s radar because of how I looked made me feel like I was only seconds from ridicule.”

— Ashley C. Ford

27. “To the world he was a bad man. To me, he was my dad who did a bad thing.”

— Ashley C. Ford

28. “We wanted to be good, as all children do, but as young Black children learn sooner than others, we don’t all get the chance to be seen that way.”

— Ashley C. Ford

29. “I thought Grandpa broke and ate everything that might love him. I didn’t want to sit here and learn to do the same. But I was already here, gutting a fish like man as I knew what that meant.”

— Ashley C. Ford

30. “I’d told myself before I got there, that I would refer to him as “Dad” because I was not a child. I was a grown woman, and I was pretty sure grown women didn’t call their fathers “Daddy.” But in that moment, I felt like someone’s little girl. And I’d been waiting a long time to feel like somebody’s daughter.”

— Ashley C. Ford

31. “I learned to carry the secrets of my badness silently and alone.”

— Ashley C. Ford

32. “If my mother and I shared anything without having carefully considered it, it was this undying ember of a dream that we will someday, somehow find ourselves reaping the bounty of a blooming mother-daughter bond, the roots of which we both refuse to tend in the meantime.”

— Ashley C. Ford

33. “I knew how to disappear. Sometimes my mother needed me to disappear.”

— Ashley C. Ford

34. “My friends were usually utterly charmed by my mother – she was her most magnetic around them, or anyone else on the outside really.”

— Ashley C. Ford

35. “My mother never apologized.”

— Ashley C. Ford

36. “I did not mind getting hurt as much as I minded being surprised by the pain. I wanted to see it coming.”

— Ashley C. Ford

37. “A swell of gratitude for my grandmother, her photos, and her stories filled my chest. My father loved me, and my mother protected me.”

— Ashley C. Ford

38. “These things catch fire without letting each other go.”

— Ashley C. Ford

39. “Grandpa told me stories that would get hung up old, useless, and dry against my ribs, marking me as his kin.”

— Ashley C. Ford

40. “When you don’t grow up with a certain kind of affection, even if you know you’re worthy of it, it can be hard to accept in adulthood.”

— Ashley C. Ford

41. “My mother, who only cried like the tears were being ripped from her face, blubbered while she yelled at her boyfriend.”

— Ashley C. Ford

42. “I wanted to assert my own style, which posed a problem, because I didn’t really have any style. Grandma would shake her head at me and say, “Someday baby, you’ll really understand how to dress. I’m just gonna pray on that for you.”

— Ashley C. Ford

43. “It was easier to laugh at the jokes after you’d forgotten the pain.”

— Ashley C. Ford

44. “I decided to pretend to be good, the kind of good that seemed to be best. The silent kind.”

— Ashley C. Ford

45. “But each time I left campus to come home, I spent ten minutes in the mirror reciting the same phrase like my therapist had taught me: I like myself the way I am. I like myself the way I am. I like myself the way I am. I like myself the way I am. Then, I would promise myself not to forget.”

— Ashley C. Ford

46. “When I turned out the light, nobody guessed I was in there telling myself stories, building safe spaces to go inside my head. They would walk right by me, never knowing I’d been there beside them in the dark.”

— Ashley C. Ford

47. “I couldn’t believe she said that! I sure did whoop her ass that day.” My mother’s face would split into the smile I rarely saw.”

— Ashley C. Ford

48. “The library felt too good to be true. All those books, on all those shelves, and I could just pluck them out, one by one, find an empty chair, and read, and read, and read.”

— Ashley C. Ford

49. “It made sense it would take someone I’d never noticed who came out of nowhere to love me.”

— Ashley C. Ford

50. “The only male teacher on the playground scooped the kid up in his arms, and ran to the school nurse. The rest of us stood around wondering what had happened to him. As usual, the adults told us nothing. One teacher blew her whistle at those of us still standing in a circle around the place he’d once stood. “You’re wasting time!” she yelled. “He’s gone. Go play.”

— Ashley C. Ford