Do you know, I spent the first half of my life avoiding motherhood and tires, and now I’m counting them as blessings?
I’m always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.
Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.
When I was Turtle’s age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn’t. Maybe I hadn’t started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.
When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them. Everyone else will finish with the singular plowing through, and Ada still has discoveries ahead and behind.
Questioning our government’s actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure.
They say you thatched your roof and now you must not run out of your house if it rains.
I will never understand it,” she said. “We’re the top of our food chain, so you’d think we’d relate to those guys the best. Seems like we’d be trying to talk them into trade agreements.” Eddie laughed at that. “So you’re telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?” “My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally.
I suppose it is in our nature,” she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” “If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.
But if we can’t summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation’s hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.
This is what it means to be very slow: every story you would like to tell has already ended before you can open your mouth.
I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress.
She made it plain that her fondest wish was to have a grandbaby. Whenever fat Irene would pick up the baby, which was not too often, Mrs. Hoge would declare, “Irene, you don’t know how becoming that looks.” As if someone ought to have a kid because it looked good on them.
A mother’s unfulfilled ambitions lie heaviest on her daughters.
If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days’ examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month’s time.
How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn’t much like to admit it, that God’s world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women.
Really it was her mother she’d wanted to call right after the bad news, or in the middle of it, while Mr. Petrofaccio was blowing his nose. 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.
Her name, he says like the Lord’s taken in vain. Sometimes he says “Mexico,” and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.
Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects.
Beautiful people liked to claim looks didn’t matter, while throwing that currency around like novice bank robbers.