Top 70 Kelly Corrigan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You have to speak your dream out loud.”

— Kelly Corrigan

2. “And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.”

— Kelly Corrigan

3. “Raising people is not some lark. It’s serious work with serious repercussions. It’s air-traffic control. You can’t step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.”

— Kelly Corrigan

4. “If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you’re making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can’t find a towel or a sponge or your “inside” voice.”

— Kelly Corrigan

5. “Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.”

— Kelly Corrigan

6. “I am your mother. The first mile of your road. Me, and all of my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give you what was given to me. A decent childhood. More good memories than bad. Some values. A sense of tribe. A run at happiness.”

— Kelly Corrigan

7. “Accepting things as they are is difficult. A lot of people go to war with reality.”

— Kelly Corrigan

8. “This tug-of-war often obscures what’s also happening between us. I am your mother, the first mile of your road. Me and all my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give to you what was given to me: a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of tribe, a run at happiness. You can’t imagine how seriously I take that – even as I fail you. Mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done.”

— Kelly Corrigan

9. “That’s how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too – not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected.”

— Kelly Corrigan

10. “The first time the words pass between two people: electrifying. Ten thousand times later: cause for marvel. The last time: the dream you revisit over and over and over again.”

— Kelly Corrigan

11. “I didn’t know adults could be changed. I thought they were finished pieces, baked through and kiln dried.”

— Kelly Corrigan

12. “The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she’s gone, it’s a whole different game.”

— Kelly Corrigan

13. “That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages – becomes a metaphor for all of life’s most meaningful endeavors.”

— Kelly Corrigan

14. “We’re never ready for the things that happen. When the big stuff happens, we’re always looking in the other direction.”

— Kelly Corrigan

15. “There’s no greater gift than to help a child see their enoughness, their might.”

— Kelly Corrigan

16. “Like the padre said, life is a mystery to be lived. Live your mystery.”

— Kelly Corrigan

17. “I envy my dad and his faith. I envy all people who have someone to beseech, who know where they’re going, who sleep under the fluffy white comforter of belief.”

— Kelly Corrigan

18. “He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime. In my case, he sees me as I would like to be seen. In fact, I’m not even sure what’s true about me, since I have always chosen to believe his version.”

— Kelly Corrigan

19. “Even when all the paperwork-a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns-clearly indicates you’re an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you’re still somebody’s daughter.”

— Kelly Corrigan

20. “I’ve come to feel downright uneasy with people who can’t say no. What if they yes you to death and then secretly hate you for it? If they never say no, how can you trust their yes? Besides, no makes room for yes, and who doesn’t want more room for that?”

— Kelly Corrigan

21. “Turbulence is the only way to get altitude – to get lift. Without turbulence the sky is just a big blue hole. Without turbulence, you sink.”

— Kelly Corrigan

22. “He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime.”

— Kelly Corrigan

23. “I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children.”

— Kelly Corrigan

24. “They said, Thank you for the food before us, the people around us, and the love between us.”

— Kelly Corrigan

25. “Learn to say no. And when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.”

— Kelly Corrigan

26. “One friend told me her one big takeaway from three years and $11,000 of therapy was Learn to say no. And when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.”

— Kelly Corrigan

27. “Resistance is suffering on permanent repeat.”

— Kelly Corrigan

28. “We’ll bury our mothers and fathers – shuttling our children off for sleepovers, jumping on red-eyes, telling eachother stories that hurt to hear, about gasping, agonal breaths, hospice nurses, scars and bruises and scabs, and how skin papers shortly after a person passes. We will nod in agreement that it is as much an honor to witness a person leave this world as it is to watch a person come into it.”

— Kelly Corrigan

29. “I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.”

— Kelly Corrigan

30. “Do you know that I love you enough to take in the full reality of your lives? That I can understand the things you think I can’t and I can see and know and embrace every bit of you, full frame, no cropping?”

— Kelly Corrigan

31. “Right then, as the first campers headed down the hill for morning cheers, twelve-year-old Lucy... said what I wish everyone would say – not “I’m sorry” but “I know.” Is there a broth more restoring than company?”

— Kelly Corrigan

32. “When you are in pain, and you see someone else in pain, there is really nothing as satisfying as giving them comfort in the night.”

— Kelly Corrigan

33. “Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.”

— Kelly Corrigan

34. “Today, all I can say is: I don’t know what I think about God, either the one who was presented to me from behind the marble altar during my childhood or the many God-like ideas that have been offered to me since. I do know that I love many believers and I pulse with gratitude that wants a locus and I wonder about the wonders I see around me and feel inside me. But I’m not sure of anything.”

— Kelly Corrigan

35. “The thing about mothers, I want to say, is that once the containment ends and one becomes two, you don’t always fit together so nicely... The living mother-daughter relationship, you learn over and over again, is a constant choice between adaptation and acceptance.”

— Kelly Corrigan

36. “Here I thought I was a special person with Special People Problems that would take a long time to diagnose and maybe even require new forms of treatment, or at least a bit of original advice. But I was everybody; a pocket truism that’s been circulating for thousands of years would suffice.”

— Kelly Corrigan

37. “Immediate, often unsolicited, sometimes undeserved forgiveness – that is what turns the wheel of family life.”

— Kelly Corrigan

38. “Do your work, Kelly. Then lean back. Rest from the striving to reduce. Like the padre said, life is a mystery to be lived. Live your mystery.”

— Kelly Corrigan

39. “As Voltaire said: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

— Kelly Corrigan

40. “Any certainty I pretend is a performance to keep the troops calm and in line. Alone in the campaign tent, with maps spread out on the folding table, I work in pencil with shaky hands.”

— Kelly Corrigan

41. “Rather than trying to make me happy, as cheap songs and misguided greeting cards suggest is the promise of true love, Edward was doing the one thing that would keep us together: taking care of himself. As with my parents, sometimes the art of relationship is declaring your limits, protecting your boundaries, saying no.”

— Kelly Corrigan

42. “What is it about a living mother that makes her so hard to see, to feel, to want, to love, to like? What a colossal waste that we can only fully appreciate certain riches – clean clothes, hot showers, good health, mothers – in their absence.”

— Kelly Corrigan

43. “Is there a broth more restoring than company?”

— Kelly Corrigan

44. “I have to pick up my kids. I have to register them for school. I have to pack their lunches and get their Hep B shots and wash their hands. They must be spotted on the stairs and potty trained and broken of the binkie. And if that relentless work runs right alongside gauging the risks of bladder surgery on a seventy-four-year-old, well, what did you think was gonna happen? What did you think being an adult was?”

— Kelly Corrigan

45. “But now I see there’s no such thing as “a” woman, “one” woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should have figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all the Motherness blocking out everything else?”

— Kelly Corrigan

46. “Makes you wonder what else people might tell you if you just keep asking questions.”

— Kelly Corrigan

47. “To love someone is to love the people they love, or at least, try.”

— Kelly Corrigan

48. “There’s no expectation of some linear progression from agony to okayness. It goes in circles. It’s sloppy.”

— Kelly Corrigan

49. “But the truth is that I’m always teetering between a mature acceptance of life’s immutables and a childish railing against the very same.”

— Kelly Corrigan

50. “In addition to helping the girls parse the world, and all its awful truths – time only goes one way, things end, affections wax and wane – I was the sole distributor of the strongest currency they would ever know: maternal love.”

— Kelly Corrigan