Susan Orlean Quotes

Everyone says, 'You give birth, you go home, and you have this amazing baby and it's just beautiful'. And I walked in and I just started sobbing.

My daughter was two weeks old when I wrote 'White Wine in the Sun.' I can remember just sobbing and having to leave the room.

Being a parent is not for the faint of heart. I may joke about knowing fear, but the fact is, the first time I ever knew real fear was the day Charlotte, my first child, was born. Suddenly there is someone in the world you care about more than anything.

When you have a baby, when you feel his love, you feel so at peace with the world. You just want to share the good news and share how happy you feel.

I've got a little boy coming and I can't wait. It's going to be the biggest thing that has happened to me in my life so far. Bigger than any Tour de France win.

My daughter was born just after the making of 'Twilight.'

I feel like I'm that typical new parent that's nervous about everything.

All parents remember the moment when they first held their children - the tiny crumpled face, an entire new person, emerging from the hospital blanket.

I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.

In spite of overwhelming grief and terror, I left Westboro in 2012.

My most defining moment was the death of my mother.

When my dad died, my world crumbled.

I remember, I was at the house with my oldest son and I got that call from Johnny Ace. You know that call. Johnny was the guy that hired me, fired me and hired me back, which was kind of cool. But I was just fired, everything stopped, my whole world stopped.

Until you go through a bereavement, you don't know how you will cope. What we have found out is that life is completely different. The foundations that you have been building all your life are knocked down.

I met my wife here. I had my first daughter here in Boston.

I cannot even begin to express how happy my baby's birth has made me.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

In grief we know the worst of what we feel but who can tell the end of what we fear?

Hold on ... Say your son or daughter has just gotten killed in a car accident and you're plastered out of your mind at 3 a.m. Are you going to be able to handle that?

Look, any guy who tells you that he didn't have some fears is lying. Of course, it's scary becoming a dad for a variety of reasons. That's not to say it isn't thrilling. It was. It was very exciting and in some ways was the greatest thing that's happened in my life. But it's also completely terrifying and you're saying goodbye to a portion of your life and that's just an emotional experience.

The room shall speak, it must catch me up and hold me, I want to feel that I belong here, I want to hearken and know when I go back to the front line that the war will sink down, be drowned utterly in the great home-coming tide, know that it will then be past for ever, and not gnaw us continually, that it will have none but an outward power over us...Nothing stirs; listless and wretched, like a condemned man, I sit there and the past withdraws itself. And at the same time I fear to importune it too much, because I do not know what might happen then. I am a soldier, I must cling to that.

I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.

It is amazing how a new child can refocus one's direction seconds after its birth. Everything falls into a feeling of 'rightness'.