I don’t know,” Magda says, “Seems like that’s just how it is with you and me. We’re like islands on the moon.
Chivalry wasn’t dead, it’s just that men didn’t own all the horses anymore, and women of Helene’s ilk didn’t need that kind of rescue.
A storm was coming up from the south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God.
You can fool history sometimes, but you can’t fool the memory of your intimates.
First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.
They are all for the great captain, while he indentures them and eats their souls and property. Somehow he gets them to side against their own.
Without shelter, we stand in daylight.
As to the career of avoiding making enemies. You can’t dig any burrow deep enough. Might as well stand and look them in the eye.
Don’t count on it. There’s a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people.
Our journey was to be a great enterprise of balance. My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God – which fortunately weighs nothing at all.
Really it’s just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that last? Five or six more years?
White is not an origin. It’s a mental construct of privilege.
One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...
First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.
Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.
It’s funny how people don’t give that much thought to what kids want, as long as they’re being quiet.
The part of my soul that is driven to make stories is a fierce thing, like a ferret: long, sleek, incapable of sleep, it digs and bites through all I know of the world.
Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask.
To stand in the clear light of day, you once said. Unsheltered.
They saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom.