It’s funny, most people can be around someone and they gradually begin to love them and never know exactly when it happened; but Ruth knew the very second it happened to her. When Idgie had grinned at her and tried to hand her that jar of honey, all these feelings that she had been trying to hold back came flooding through her, and it was at that second in time that she knew she loved Idgie with all her heart.
There are magnificent beings on this earth, son, that are walking around posing as humans.
They say the truth can set you free, but sometimes it can really depress the hell out of you.
All those calm, adult discussions. When all she really wanted to do was scream for her momma, her sweet momma, the one person in the world who loved her better than anyone ever would or ever could.
If there is such a thing as complete happiness, it is knowing that you are in the right place.
Idgie smiled back at her and looked up into the clear blue sky that reflected in her eyes and she was as happy as anybody who is in love in the summertime can be.
People didn’t call blacks names anymore, at least not to their faces. Italians weren’t wops or dagos, and there were no more kikes, Japs, chinks, or spics in polite conversation. Everybody had a group to protest and stick up for them. But women were still being called names by men. Why? Where was our group? It’s not fair.
Like I say, it just creeps up on you. One day you’re young and the next day your bosoms and your chin drops and you’re wearing a rubber girdle. But you don’t know you’re old.
I’m too young to be old and too old to be young.
In America, no matter how poor you started out or where you came from, you could go as high as you wanted if you were willing to work for it.
To Toot One’s Own Horn Is Unattractive.
Depression years come back to me now as the happy times, even though we were all struggling. We were happy and didn’t know it.
Whom the heart first loves does not know or care if they are related by blood.
We must be kind and forgive one another or we won’t survive. But even among the most religious there seems to be a great blind spot covering the world, an inability to learn from past experience. Civilization is as precarious as a sand castle. All the care and effort it took to create it can be knocked down in a second by some bully or another. And the world is full of bullies.
Buddy, night and day. We even started calling her Cupid. Idgie was.
Because any idiot can get married and have children; that’s no great accomplishment.
Ida had always been different. At school, when all the kids used to play church, and one would be the preacher, another the preacher’s wife, a deacon, and the choir leader, and some would be the parishioners who had come to the church, Ida said she wanted to be God, because she was the only one who knew how to do it. Of.
Oh no, honey. Lots of women go through it early. Why, there was this woman over in Georgia who was only thirty-six-years-old and one day she got in her car and drove right up the stairs to the county courthouse, rolled down her window, and tossed her mother’s head that she had just chopped off in her kitchen at a State policeman and hollered, “Here! This is what you wanted,” and drove right back down the courthouse stairs. Now that’s what an early menopause will do for you if you’re not careful.
Mildred had had a few men friends after that, but she never really loved any of them. None could ever compete with the one that got away.
She sat there admiring the beauty of the light amber fluid in the clear bottle, the way the condensation on the Miller bottle ran down the black and gold label, like it was a fine piece of art. That was the problem with alcohol. It was so beautiful to look at, how could you resist it? And what kind of place could be more inviting and seductive than a truly elegant cocktail bar?