We are not born with effective vision. The human infant has to learn how to see. The eyes gather information, they transmit it to the brain, but the brain doesn’t know how to process it yet. We learn how to see in a way that’s very similar to the way we learn how to speak. It takes a couple of years. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
There’s as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
When I was a senior in high school, I went to Ireland to study Irish Gaelic. And after one semester at Trinity College, I went way out to the west coast of Ireland and rented a little house by myself. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
China was not at all what I expected it to be. I had an image of China as a very quaint and mysterious and peaceful place. Well, it’s quaint and mysterious in some respects, but not in the ways I had thought. The people are mysterious. They don’t often tell you what they feel. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
Not one day of my mother’s adult life passed without some critical demand on her maternal role, without some urgent response from her. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
My mother was not what anyone would call sweet, and she wasn’t conventional. When my brother couldn’t find his shoes one morning, she said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, it won’t kill him not to have shoes for a day,’ and sent him to school without them. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
Though my grandmother had picked up modern ideas in America, she still had some conflicting 19th-century Irish notions. She believed that daughters, educated though they may be, should continue to live at home until they were married. Rosemary Mahoney Read Quote
