- "Anyone could tell it, anyone who had a momma who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes, who picked cotton in other people's fields and ironed other people's clothes and cleaned the mess in other people's houses, so that her children didn't have to live on welfare alone, so that one of them could climb up her backbone and escape the poverty and hopelessness that ringed them, free and clean" (xii).
- "While you read words laced with bitterness and killing anger and vicious envy, words of violence and sadness and hopefully, dark humor, you will not read much whining. Not on her part, certainly, because she does not know how" (xiii).
- "But I came home to a coldly modern funeral home, to the people of our community sitting quietly in their pews, white socks peeking out from under their black dress pants" (xiv).
- "These were people who remembered the weight of the cotton sack, people with grease under their fingernails that no amount of Octagon soap would ever scrub away, people who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people" (xv).
- "I finally understand what death is: simple wanting" (xvi).
- "I already know a good bit about my history, stories that were seldom written down, only passed from one to another of us over cones of strawberry ice cream in the gravel parking lot of the tiny store owned by a one-legged man named Tillison. I heard them over the ring of guitar strings on the front porch, over the endless, beautiful, hateful rows of cotton that I still dream about even today, even though the fields lie in trash and weeds" (xvii).
- "...because hungry does not have a color" (xvii).
- "But one of the best men I have ever known told me once that to tell a story right you have to lean the words against each other sot that they don't all fall down" (xix).
- "'Write it,' she said. 'I sat quiet, for fifty years'" (xix).
- "I walked through neighborhoods in my own country where the killing is done with laughter, acting like I was ten feet tall and bulletproof even as my legs trembled, because I believe that if we are going to write about life and death we should not do it from the cheap seats" (xx).
- "Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or how damaged the shell that carries it" (xxi).
- "He wanted them because they were pretty, because they were wrapped in fake leather, because they looked like rich folks' books" (13).
- "He used his aged, ruined voice like an old man's palsied hands to pick the lock on his past, and tugged me inside" (14).
- "I begged him, once to change, for her. He only grinned. My momma has grown old beside him, afraid. My father took her youth, boy. Let her have her old age" (165).
- "He calls me sometimes, usually when he is drinking, and tells me he loves me" (168).
- "Funny, where boys find their heroes... But the one I wanted to be just like for the longest time was the one who beat me up every other Thursday, who chased me around and around the house with a slingshot loaded with chinaberries, who lied and told me that a sunk-in septic tank outside the house was really an unmarked grave, who rigged up a trapeze in the barn and let me go first, to test the ropes, and who hid with me under that bed in that big, hateful house, and, as tears rolled down my face, put his arm around my shoulders" (171).
- "Just because they let you in the school door doesn't mean they're going to invite you to the dance" (235).
aug 19 2012 ∞
aug 19 2012 +